He spoke as youthfully as if he were of Vane's own age.
Vane considered a second or so, and then sprang to his feet.
"Yes," he said, "I will come. Good-night, Luke. Stay on; enjoy yourself. Shall I see you to-morrow? Good-night!"
They went out together, the young man and the one with the white hair. One glance into the mirror flashed from Orson's eyes as he turned to go; it brought him a memory of a burnished halo on a fragile, rosy, beauty. He sighed to himself, wishing he could reach the truth behind the robe of beauty, and, with that sigh, turned with a sort of fierceness upon his companion.
"Well," said Vane, "well?"
They were passing through a most motley thoroughfare. Barrel-organs dotted the asphalt; Italian and Sicilian poverty elbowed the poverty of Russian and Polish Jews. The shops bore signs in Italian, Hebrew, French—in anything but English. The Elevated roared above the music and the chatter; the cool gloom of lower Broadway seemed far away.
"Patience," said the old man, "patience, Mr. Vane. Look about you! How much of the heart of this humanity that reeks all about us do we know? Think,—think of your Chinese wall! Oh—how strange, how very strange that I should have come upon you to-night, when, in despair of ever finding my man, I had gone for distraction to a place where, I thought, philosophy nor science were but little welcome."
"My dear Professor," urged Vane finally, when they were come to a stiller region, where many churches, some parks and ivy-sheltered houses gave an air of age and sobriety and history, "I have no more patience left. Did I not know your name for what it is I would not have followed you. Even now I hardly know whether your name and your title suffice. If it is an adventure, very well. But I have no more patience for mysteries."
"Not even when you are about to penetrate the greatest mystery of all? Oh, youth, youth! Well, we have still a little distance to go. I shall employ it to impress upon you that I, Professor Vanlief, am not over-fond of the title of Professor. It has, here in America, a taint of the charlatan. But it came to me, this title, in a place where only honors were implied. I was, indeed, a fellow student with many of whom the world has since heard; Bismarck was one of them. I have eaten smoked goose with him in Pommern. You see, I am very old, very old. I have spent my life solving a riddle. It is the same riddle that has balked you, my young friend. But I have striven for the solution; you have merely wailed against the riddle's existence."
Vane felt a flush of shame.