He too was calm, business-like, detached.  He strangled a happy smile which suggested that her question was absurd.  To start a new section was to work gloomily by himself, at some distant quarter of the room; to write to her dictation was to be near her, soothed by her voice and made forgetful by her eyes.  Hypocritically he feigned a minute’s reflection, as if it were a matter for hesitation and for choice.

“Wouldn’t you find it less tiring if I read and you wrote?”

“No, I had better read.  You can write faster than I can.”

So he wrote his fastest, while Lucia Harden read out titles to him in the sonorous Latin tongue.  She was standing ankle-deep in Gnostics and Neo-Platonists; as for Mr. Rickman, he was, as he observed, out of his depth there altogether.

“Iamblichus, De Mysteriis Egyptiorum.  Do you know him?”

Mr. Rickman smiled as he admitted that his acquaintance with Iamblichus was of the slightest; Lucia laughed as she confessed an ignorance extending to the very name.  He noticed that she always seemed pleased when she had any ignorance to own up to; had she found out that this gave pleasure to other people?

“Is he Philosophy, or is he Religion?” She invariably deferred to Rickman on a question of classification.  She handed the book to him.  “Can you tell?”

“I really don’t know; he seems to be both.  I’d better have a look at him.”  He turned over the pages, glancing at the text.  “I say, listen to this.”

He hit on a passage at random, and read out the Greek, translating fluently.

“’If then the presence of the divine fire and the unspeakable form of the divine light descend upon a man, wholly filling and dominating him, and encompassing him on every side, so that he can in no way carry on his own affairs, what sense or understanding or perception of ordinary matters should he have who has received the divine fire?’ Can he be referring to the business capacity of poets?”

Lucia listened amused.  And all the time he was thinking, “If I don’t tell her now I shall never tell her.  She’ll sneak off with Miss Palliser somewhere in the afternoon.”  Neither noticed that Robert had come in and was standing by with a telegram.  Robert gazed at Mr. Rickman with admiration, while he respectfully waited for the end of the paragraph; that, he judged, being the proper moment for attracting his mistress’ attention.

Never in all his life would Rickman forget that passage in the De Mysteriis which he had not been thinking about.  As Lucia took the telegram she was still looking at Rickman and the smile of amusement was still on her face.  Robert respectfully withdrew.  Lucia opened the envelope and Rickman looked down, apparently absorbed in Iamblichus.  He was now considering in what form of words he would tell her.

Then, without looking up, he knew that something had happened.  His first feeling was that it had happened to himself.  He could not say how or why or what was the precise moment of its happening; he only knew that she had been talking to him, listening to him, smiling at him, and that then something had swept him on one side and carried her away, he did not know where, except that it was beyond his reach.