With an adventurous sense of breaking with routine and doing something interestingly dangerous, Guthrie telephoned, and came.
Five minutes after he met her he was quarrelling like an old friend with Vida Martin—over Thompson and Geddes’ “rustic reinterpretation” of evolution. Vida would none of it, holding that Nature’s creative centres are now great cities—where evolution is kept entirely too busy making a new kind of soul in women to bother with bugs and things.
Of the woman’s revolution Guthrie had a literary knowledge, but in his cooped life Vida was the first who embodied it—the first who viewed life with the unshockable tolerance of science, the first whose mental background was wholly non-theological, the first even who was wholly conscious of her economic independence and its implications. The new ideas and feelings alive in her made him see the paleness of what he had got from those plays, novels, and sociology books. The quiet fearlessness with which she gave him and Kenton Clark to understand that she had
laid aside ready made morality, “the parasite code of woman subordinate,” took his scholarly breath. She had replaced it, he gathered, not with another code, but with a habit of discrimination “confronting apparent good and evil with armed light—the Ithuriel spear of woman free.” So unprofessorily the professor phrased it when the thoughts she stirred in him began to sing. He was not aware of it, but they sang the sooner because her heavy black hair had copper glints in it and the joy of thinking made her eyes such wells of light.
“I’ve been thirteen years here in my treadmill,” he said to her as he was leaving. “You, from your wonderful cities, make me realize that I have taught all the life out of my old knowledge. I need new contacts with the life of to-day. I must have more significant things to teach. I want to see all I can of you while you’re here, and then—it would help to keep in touch with you and your world through letters.”
He started to ask her and Clark to dinner, but reflected that he must first go home and lead up to that.
“There’s a living soul,” said Kenton Clark when Guthrie had gone.
“And with a flickering creativeness,” Vida added. “I wonder if anything could gather the flickers into a flame?”
“A passion for a woman,” Clark surmised.
“Or a cause.”