n a less interesting
animal. I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham.
Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.'

And for one curious instant he looked out over the village, his
fastidious scholar's soul absorbed by some intellectual irritation, of
which Rose understood absolutely nothing. She stood bewildered, silent,
longing childishly to speak, to influence him, but not knowing what cue
to take.

'And then--' he went on presently (but was the strange being speaking to
her?)--'so long as I stay there, worrying those about me, and eating my
own heart out, I am cut off from the only life that might be mine, that
I might find the strength to live.'

The words were low and deliberate. After his moment of passionate
speech, and hers of passionate sympathy, she began to feel strangely
remote from him.

'Do you mean the life of the student?' she asked him after a pause,
timidly.

Her voice recalled him. He turned and smiled at her.

'Of the dreamer, rather.'

And as her eyes still questioned, as he was still moved by the spell of
her responsiveness, he let the new wave of feeling break in words.
Vaguely at first, and then with a growing flame and force, he fell to
describing to her what the life of thought may be to the thinker, and
those marvellous moments which belong to that life when the mind which
has divorced itself from desire and sense sees spread out before it the
vast realms of knowledge, and feels itself close to the secret springs
and sources of being. And as he spoke, his language took an ampler turn,
the element of smallness which attaches to all mere personal complaint
vanished, his words flowed, became eloquent, inspired, till the
bewildered child beside him, warm through and through as she was with
youth and passion, felt for an instant by sheer fascinated sympathy the
cold spell, the ineffable prestige, of the thinker's voluntary death in
life.

But only for an instant. Then the natural sense of chill smote her to
the heart.

'You make me shiver,' she cried, interrupting him. 'Have those strange
things--I don't understand them--made you happy? Can they make any one
happy? Oh no, no! Happiness is to be got from living, seeing,
experiencing, making friends, enjoying nature! Look at the world, Mr.
Langham!' she said, with bright cheeks, half smiling at her own
magniloquence, her hand waving over the view before them. 'What has it
done that you should hate it so?