“I ought to be going,” she said, as though she had been paying him a formal visit.
“Don't hurry,” he protested cordially. “Why hurry back to Hampton?”
“I never want to go back!” she cried with a vehemence that caused him to contemplate her anew, suddenly revealing the intense, passionate quality which had so disturbed Mr. Ditmar. She stood transformed. “I hate it!” she declared. “It's so ugly, I never want to see it again.”
“Yes, it is ugly,” he confessed. “Since you admit it, I don't mind saying so. But it's interesting, in a way.” Though his humorous moods had delighted her, she felt subtly flattered because he had grown more serious.
“It is interesting,” she agreed. She was almost impelled to tell him why, in her excursions to the various quarters, she had found Hampton interesting, but a shyness born of respect for the store of knowledge she divined in him restrained her. She was curious to know what this man saw in Hampton. His opinion would be worth something. Unlike her neighbours in Fillmore Street, he was not what her sister Lise would call “nutty”; he had an air of fine sanity, of freedom, of detachment,—though the word did not occur to her; he betrayed no bitter sense of injustice, and his beliefs were uncoloured by the obsession of a single panacea. “Why do you think it's interesting?” she demanded.
“Well, I'm always expecting to hear that it's blown up. It reminds me of nitro-glycerine,” he added, smiling.
She repeated the word.
“An explosive, you know—they put it in dynamite. They say a man once made it by accident, and locked up his laboratory and ran home—and never went back.”
“I know what you mean!” she cried, her eyes alight with excitement. “All those foreigners! I've felt it that something would happen, some day, it frightened me, and yet I wished that something would happen. Only, I never would have thought of—nitro-glycerine.”
She was unaware of the added interest in his regard. But he answered lightly enough:—“Oh, not only the foreigners. Human chemicals—you can't play with human chemicals any more than you can play with real ones—you've got to know something about chemistry.”