Insall’s comic spirit, betrayed by his expressions, by the quizzical intonations of his voice, never failed to fill Janet with joy, while it was somehow suggestive, too, of the vast fund of his resource.  Mrs. Maturin was right, he could have solved many of her questions offhand if he had so wished, but he had his own method of dealing with appeals.  His head tilted on one side, apparently in deep thought over the problem, he never answered outright, but by some process of suggestion unfathomable to Janet, and by eliminating, not too deprecatingly, Mrs. Maturin’s impatient proposals, brought her to a point where she blurted out the solution herself.

“Oriental poppies!  How stupid of me not to think of them!”

“How stupid of me!” Insall echoed—­and Janet, bending over her weeding, made sure they had been in his mind all the while.

Augusta Maturin’s chief extravagance was books; she could not bear to await her turn at the library, and if she liked a book she wished to own it.  Subscribing to several reviews, three English and one American, she scanned them eagerly every week and sent in orders to her Boston bookseller.  As a consequence the carved walnut racks on her library table were constantly being strained.  A good book, she declared, ought to be read aloud, and discussed even during its perusal.  And thus Janet, after an elementary and decidedly unique introduction to worth-while literature in the hospital, was suddenly plunged into the vortex of modern thought.  The dictum Insall quoted, that modern culture depended largely upon what one had not read, was applied to her; a child of the new environment fallen into skilful hands, she was spared the boredom of wading through the so-called classics which, though useful as milestones, as landmarks for future reference, are largely mere reminders of an absolute universe now vanished.  The arrival of a novel, play, or treatise by one of that small but growing nucleus of twentieth century seers was an event, and often a volume begun in the afternoon was taken up again after supper.  While Mrs. Maturin sat sewing on the other side of the lamp, Janet had her turn at reading.  From the first she had been quick to note Mrs. Maturin’s inflections, and the relics of a high-school manner were rapidly eliminated.  The essence of latter-day realism and pragmatism, its courageous determination to tear away a veil of which she had always been dimly aware, to look the facts of human nature in the face, refreshed her:  an increasing portion of it she understood; and she was constantly under the spell of the excitement that partially grasps, that hovers on the verge of inspiring discoveries.  This excitement, whenever Insall chanced to be present, was intensified, as she sat a silent but often quivering listener to his amusing and pungent comments on these new ideas.  His method of discussion never failed to illuminate and delight her, and often, when she sat at her typewriter the next day, she would recall one of his quaint remarks that suddenly threw a bright light on some matter hitherto obscure....  Occasionally a novel or a play was the subject of their talk, and then they took a delight in drawing her out, in appealing to a spontaneous judgment unhampered by pedagogically implanted preconceptions.  Janet would grow hot from shyness.