“When I undertook to spread before you the true and veracious history of my life,” he began, striving to make his tone light, “you would none of it.”
“Are you determined to put me off? Do you think that I wouldn’t find the things that are real to you interesting?”
“They’re quite technical,” he said shyly.
“But they are the big things to you, aren’t they? They make life for you?”
“Oh, yes; that, of course.” It was as if he were surprised at the need of such a question. “I suppose I find the same excitement and adventure in research that other men find in politics, or war, or making money.”
“Adventure?” she said, puzzled. “I shouldn’t have supposed research an adventurous career, exactly.”
“No; not from the outside.” His hidden gaze shifted to sweep the far distances. His voice dropped and softened, and, when he spoke again, she felt vaguely and strangely that he was hardly thinking of her or her question, except as a part of the great wonder-world surrounding and enfolding their companioned remoteness.
“This is my credo,” he said, and quoted, half under his breath:—
“‘We have come in search of truth,
Trying with uncertain key
Door by door of mystery.
We are reaching, through His laws,
To the garment hem of Cause.
As, with fingers of the blind,
We are groping here to find
What the hieroglyphics mean
Of the Unseen in the seen;
What the Thought which underlies
Nature’s masking and disguise;
What it is that hides beneath
Blight and bloom and birth and death.’”
Other men had poured poetry into Polly Brewster’s ears, and she had thought them vapid or priggish or affected, according as they had chosen this or that medium. This man was different. For all his outer grotesquery, the noble simplicity of the verse matched some veiled and hitherto but half-expressed quality within him, and dignified him. Miss Brewster suffered the strange but not wholly unpleasant sensation of feeling herself dwindle.