The Descent of Man

The Other Two

Expiation

The Lady’s Maid’s Bell

The Mission of Jane

The Reckoning

The Letter

The Dilettante

The Quicksand

A Venetian Night’s Entertainment

THE DESCENT OF MAN

I

When Professor Linyard came back from his holiday in the Maine woods the air of rejuvenation he brought with him was due less to the influences of the climate than to the companionship he had enjoyed on his travels.  To Mrs. Linyard’s observant eye he had appeared to set out alone; but an invisible traveller had in fact accompanied him, and if his heart beat high it was simply at the pitch of his adventure:  for the Professor had eloped with an idea.

No one who has not tried the experiment can divine its exhilaration.  Professor Linyard would not have changed places with any hero of romance pledged to a flesh-and-blood abduction.  The most fascinating female is apt to be encumbered with luggage and scruples:  to take up a good deal of room in the present and overlap inconveniently into the future; whereas an idea can accommodate itself to a single molecule of the brain or expand to the circumference of the horizon.  The Professor’s companion had to the utmost this quality of adaptability.  As the express train whirled him away from the somewhat inelastic circle of Mrs. Linyard’s affections, his idea seemed to be sitting opposite him, and their eyes met every moment or two in a glance of joyous complicity; yet when a friend of the family presently joined him and began to talk about college matters, the idea slipped out of sight in a flash, and the Professor would have had no difficulty in proving that he was alone.

But if, from the outset, he found his idea the most agreeable of fellow-travellers, it was only in the aromatic solitude of the woods that he tasted the full savour of his adventure.  There, during the long cool August days, lying full length on the pine-needles and gazing up into the sky, he would meet the eyes of his companion bending over him like a nearer heaven.  And what eyes they were!—­clear yet unfathomable, bubbling with inexhaustible laughter, yet drawing their freshness and sparkle from the central depths of thought!  To a man who for twenty years had faced an eye reflecting the obvious with perfect accuracy, these escapes into the inscrutable had always been peculiarly inviting; but hitherto the Professor’s mental infidelities had been restricted by an unbroken and relentless domesticity.  Now, for the first time since his marriage, chance had given him six weeks to himself, and he was coming home with his lungs full of liberty.