eeply you meditate and
work. Instead of condemning you for your studies, I admire you very
much!"

Her face, upturned from the microscope, was so sweet, sincere, and
self-forgetful in its aspect that the susceptible Fitzpiers more than
wished to annihilate the lineal yard which separated it from his own.
Whether anything of the kind showed in his eyes or not, Grace remained
no longer at the microscope, but quickly went her way into the rain.

CHAPTER XIX.

Instead of resuming his investigation of South's brain, which perhaps
was not so interesting under the microscope as might have been expected
from the importance of that organ in life, Fitzpiers reclined and
ruminated on the interview. Grace's curious susceptibility to his
presence, though it was as if the currents of her life were disturbed
rather than attracted by him, added a special interest to her general
charm. Fitzpiers was in a distinct degree scientific, being ready and
zealous to interrogate all physical manifestations, but primarily he
was an idealist. He believed that behind the imperfect lay the
perfect; that rare things were to be discovered amid a bulk of
commonplace; that results in a new and untried case might be different
from those in other cases where the conditions had been precisely
similar. Regarding his own personality as one of unbounded
possibilities, because it was his own--notwithstanding that the factors
of his life had worked out a sorry product for thousands--he saw
nothing but what was regular in his discovery at Hintock of an
altogether exceptional being of the other sex, who for nobody else
would have had any existence.

One habit of Fitzpiers's--commoner in dreamers of more advanced age
than in men of his years--was that of talking to himself. He paced
round his room with a selective tread upon the more prominent blooms of
the carpet, and murmured, "This phenomenal girl will be the light of my
life while I am at Hintock; and the special beauty of the situation is
that our attitude and relations to each other will be purely spiritual.
Socially we can never be intimate. Anything like matrimonial
intentions towards her, charming as she is, would be absurd. They
would spoil the ethereal character of my regard. And, indeed, I have
other aims on the practical side of my life."

Fitzpiers bestowed a regulation thought on the advantageous marriage he
was bound to make with a woman of family as good as his own, and of
purse