“Poor chap!” said Marcelle, absently.
“That’s kind of you, but it’s just what I’m hating. I don’t want to go through life as a ‘poor chap.’ ” He paused, then ran on: “I wonder how you dear people can look at the beastly thing. Whenever I cock my leg down and try to have a sight of it, it nearly makes me sick. I like to be neat and tidy and not repulsive to my fellow-creatures, but that crimpled-crumpled end of me is just slovenly and disgusting.”
Marcelle Baring scarcely heeded his debonair talk. His name had awakened far-off memories. She worked in silence, pinned the bandage and, smiling, with a “You’ll do all right, Mr. Baltazar,” left him.
The shock came the next afternoon. As she passed through the great entrance hall, fitted up as a lounge with the heterogeneous furniture, she came across him, the solitary occupant, sitting at a table, busy with pencil and writing pad and a thick volume propped up in front of him. Her eye caught arresting symbols on the paper, then the page-heading of the book: “Rigid Dynamics.”
She paused. He looked up with a laugh.
“Hello, Sister!”
She said, with a catch in her breath, “You’re a mathematician?”
He laughed. “More or less. If they kick me out of the Army, I must go back to Cambridge and begin again where I left off.”
“You must have left off rather high, if you’re reading Rigid.”
He started, for no one in this wide world but a mathematical student could have used the phrase.