“Do you read Euripides?” he asked with naive wonder.

“Yes.”

“And AEschylus and Sophocles and Aristoph—?” Mr. Rickman became embarrassed as he recalled certain curious passages, and in his embarrassment he rushed upon his doom—­“and—­and ’Omer?”

It was a breakdown unparalleled in his history.  Never since his childhood had he neglected the aspirate in Homer.  A flush made manifest his agony.  He frowned, and gazed at her steadily, as if he defied her to judge him by that lapse.

“Yes,” said the lady; but she was not thinking of Homer.

“By Jove,” he murmured pensively.  His eyes turned from her and devoured the text.  He was torn between abject admiration of the lady and of the book.

“Which do you like best?” he asked suddenly.  AEschylus or Sophocles?  But it’s an absurd question.”

“Why absurd?”

“Because they’re so different.”

“Are they?” To tell the truth she was not thinking of them any more than she had been thinking of Homer.

He became perfectly hectic with excitement.  “Rather!  Can’t you see the difference?  Sophocles carved his tragedies.  He carved them in ivory, polished them up, back and front, till you can’t see the marks of the chisel.  And AEschylus jabbed his out of the naked granite where it stood, and left them there with the sea at their feet, and the mist round their heads, and the fire at their hearts.”

“But—­but he left the edges a little rough.”

“He did.  God leaves them so sometimes when he’s making a big thing.”

Something like a faint ripple of light passed over her face under the obscuring veil it wore for him.

“But Sophocles is perfect,” said she.  She was not thinking of Sophocles one bit; she was thinking that when God made Mr. Rickman he had left the edges rough, and wondering whether it was possible that he had made “a big thing.”

“Oh yes, he’s perfect.”  He began to quote softly and fluently, to her uttermost surprise.  His English was at times a thing to shudder at, but his Greek was irreproachable, perfect in its modulation and its flow.  Freed from all flaws of accent, the musical quality of his voice declared itself indubitably, marvellously pure.

The veil lifted.  Her smile was a flash of intelligence, the sexless, impersonal intelligence of the scholar.  This maker of catalogues, with the tripping tongue that Greek made golden, he had touched the electric chain that linked them under the deep, under the social gulf.

“Did you ever hear such a chorus?  Pure liquid gold, every line of it.  Still, you can read Sophocles with your hair on.  I should have thought most worn—­most ladies would like Euripides best?”

“Why?  Because they understand him best?”

“No.  Because he understood them best.”

“Did he understand them?  Euripides,” said the young lady with decision, “was a decadent.”