“That accounts for the agreement in thought. You admire the book?”
“I think it is a conscientious attempt to describe what the author saw.”
“Ah, it is much more than that!” you exclaimed. “At a dinner in London, this autumn, I sat next the Earl—— next a member of the Indian Council, and he told me he considered it a far more brilliant book than Kinglake’s Eothen.”
I knew I had no right to continue this subject, but I could not help asking, “You liked it?”
“Very much. It seems to me a deep and philosophic study of present and future problems, besides being a vivid picture of most interesting countries and peoples. It made me long to be a nomad myself, and wander as the author did. The thought of three years of such life, of such freedom, seems to stir in me all the inherited tendency to prowl that we women supposedly get from Mother Sphinx.”
“Civilization steals nature from us and compounds the theft with art.”
“Tell me about Professor Humzel,” you went on, “for I know I should like him, merely from the way he writes. One always pictures the German professor as a dried-up mind in a dried-up body, but in this book one is conscious of real flesh and blood. He is a young man, I’m sure.”
“Sixty-two.”
“He has a young heart, then,” you asserted. “Is he as interesting to talk with as he makes himself in his book?”
“Professor Humzel is very silent.”