Add to this an insatiable curiosity as to causes, and you have the main bent of Eliot’s mind.

And it seemed to him that there was nobody but Anne who saw that hidden side of him. She knew that he was sorry for people, and that being sorry for them had made him what he was, like Jerrold and yet unlike him.  Eliot was attracted to suffering by the same sensitiveness that made Jerrold avoid everything once associated with it.

And so the very thing that Jerrold couldn’t bear to remember was what drew Eliot closer to Anne.  He saw her as Jerrold had seen her, moving, composed and competent, in his father’s room; he saw her stooping over him to help him, he saw the specks of blood on her white sleeve; and he thought of her with the more tenderness.  From that instant he really loved her.  He wanted Anne as he had never conceived himself wanting any woman.  He could hardly remember his first adolescent feeling for her, that confused mixture of ignorant desire and fear, so different was it from the intense, clear passion that possessed him now.  At night when his work was done, he lay in bed, not sleeping, thinking of Anne with desire that knew itself too well to be afraid.  Anne was the one thing necessary to him beside his work, necessary as a living part of himself.  She could only not come before his work because Eliot’s work came before himself and his own happiness.  When he went down every other week-end to Wyck-on-the-Hill he knew that it was to see Anne.

His mother knew it too.

“I wish Eliot would marry,” she said.

“Why?” said Anne.

“Because then he wouldn’t be so keen on going off to look for germs in disgusting climates.”

Anne wondered whether Adeline knew Eliot.  For Eliot talked to her about his work as he walked with her at a fine swinging pace over the open country, taking all his exercise now while he could get it.  That was another thing he liked about Anne Severn, her splendid physical fitness; she could go stride for stride with him, and mile for mile, and never tire.  Her mind, too, was robust and active, and full of curiosity; it listened by the hour and never tired.  It could move, undismayed, among horrors.  She could see, as he saw, the “beauty” of the long trains of research by which Sir Martin Crozier had tracked down the bacillus of amoebic dysentery and established the difference between typhoid and Malta fever.

Once started on his subject, the grave, sullen Eliot talked excitedly.

“You do see, Anne, how thrilling it is, don’t you?  For me there’s nothing but bacteriology.  I always meant to go in for it, and Sir Martin’s magnificent.  Absolutely top-hole.  You see, all these disgusting diseases can be prevented.  It’s inconceivable that they should be tolerated in a civilized country.  People can’t care a rap or they couldn’t sleep in their beds.  They ought to get up and make a public row about it, to insist on compulsory inoculation for everybody whether