and irritated him, because the terminology was over his head.  And the fact that he could not follow these men in full intellectual flight spurred him to find the truth or falsity of those things for himself.  He got an inkling of the economic problems that afflict society.  He found himself assenting offhand to the reasonable theorem that a man who produced wealth was entitled to what he produced.  He listened to many a wordy debate in which the theory of evolution was opposed to the seven-day creation.  There was thus revived in him some of those troublesome perplexities which Sam and Sophie Carr had first aroused.

In the end, lacking profitable employment and growing dubious of obtaining it during the slack industrial season which then hovered over California, he turned to the serried shelves of the city library.  Once started along this road he became an habitue, spending in a particular chair at a certain table anywhere from three to six hours a day, deep in a book, not to be deterred therefrom by the usual series of mental shocks which a man, full-fed all his life on conventions and dogmas and superficial thinking, gets when he first goes seriously and critically into the fields of scientific conclusions.

He was seated at a reading table one afternoon, nursing his chin in one hand, deep in a volume of Huxley’s “Lectures and Essays” which was making a profound impression upon him through its twin merits of simple, concise language and breadth of vision.  There was in it a rational explanation of certain elementary processes which to Thompson had never been accounted for save by means of the supernatural, the mysterious, the inexplicable.  Huxley was merely sharpening a function of his mind which had been dormant until he ran amuck among the books.  He began to perceive order in the universe and all that it contained, that natural phenomena could be interpreted by a study of nature, that there was something more than a name in geology.  And he was so immersed in what he read, in the printed page and the inevitable speculations that arose in his mind as he conned it, that he was only subconsciously aware of a woman passing his seat.

Slowly, as a man roused from deep sleep looks about him for the cause of dimly heard noises, so now Thompson’s eyes lifted from his book, and, with his mind still half upon the last sentence read, his gaze followed the girl now some forty feet distant in the long, quiet room.

There was no valid reason why the rustle of a woman’s skirt in passing, the faint suggestion of some delicate perfume, should have focussed his attention.  He saw scores of women and girls in the library every day.  He passed thousands on the streets.  This one, now, upon whom he gazed with a detached interest, was like many others, a girl of medium height, slender, well-dressed.