“I don’t believe I can ever quite hate the Caribbean again.”

“From this view you mustn’t, anyway.  I shouldn’t like that.  As for our lake, nobody could really help loving it.  So you must be sure and come, won’t you?”

“Dreams!” he murmured.

“Isn’t there room in the scientific life for dreams?”

“Yes.  But not for their fulfillment.”

“But there will be beetles and dragon-flies on our mountain,” she went on, conscious of talking against time, of striving to put off the moment of departure.  “You’ll find plenty of work there.  Do you know, Mr. Beetle Man, you haven’t told me a thing, really, about your work, or a thing, really, about yourself.  Is that the way to treat a friend?”

“When I undertook to spread before you the true and veracious history of my life,” he began, striving to make his tone light, “you would none of it.”

“Are you determined to put me off?  Do you think that I wouldn’t find the things that are real to you interesting?”

“They’re quite technical,” he said shyly.

“But they are the big things to you, aren’t they?  They make life for you?”

“Oh, yes; that, of course.”  It was as if he were surprised at the need of such a question.  “I suppose I find the same excitement and adventure in research that other men find in politics, or war, or making money.”

“Adventure?” she said, puzzled.  “I shouldn’t have supposed research an adventurous career, exactly.”

“No; not from the outside.”  His hidden gaze shifted to sweep the far distances.  His voice dropped and softened, and, when he spoke again, she felt vaguely and strangely that he was hardly thinking of her or her question, except as a part of the great wonder-world surrounding and enfolding their companioned remoteness.

“This is my credo,” he said, and quoted, half under his breath:—­

    “’We have come in search of truth,
      Trying with uncertain key
      Door by door of mystery. 
      We are reaching, through His laws,
      To the garment hem of Cause. 
      As, with fingers of the blind,
      We are groping here to find
      What the hieroglyphics mean
      Of the Unseen in the seen;
      What the Thought which underlies
      Nature’s masking and disguise;
      What it is that hides beneath
      Blight and bloom and birth and death.’”

Other men had poured poetry into Polly Brewster’s ears, and she had thought them vapid or priggish or affected, according as they had chosen this or that medium.  This man was different.  For all his outer grotesquery, the noble simplicity of the verse matched some veiled and hitherto but half-expressed quality within him, and dignified him.  Miss Brewster suffered the strange but not wholly unpleasant sensation of feeling herself dwindle.

“It’s very beautiful,” she said, with an effort.  “Is it Matthew Arnold?”