every mail. Though a world apart, he and Marcella seemed
to get closer together. He was growing younger with age, and she older.
He told her he had no friend but her letters, and wrote, sometimes
thirty pages of his small, neat handwriting to her--all about his
cases, his thoughts, his reading. And every book he bought he passed on
to her. Louis had had to put up three more shelves for them.

"I've been unduly extravagant, Mrs. Marcella," he wrote once, at the end
of the second year. "I've left the rheumaticky old woman to a sort of
patent rubbing oil very much in vogue just now, and I've resigned the
coming babies to the midwife at Carlossie, and been to Kraill's
Lendicott Trust lectures at Edinburgh. He seems, in my humble and very
uninstructed opinion, to have gone very far since 'Questing Cells.' The
lectures were on sex psychology. He admits that they are coloured by
what he learnt at Heidelberg last year. But he goes further than Germans
could possibly go. There's a gentleness, a humanity about him, and a
spirituality one doesn't expect from the author of 'Questing Cells' or
from those Lendicott lectures a few years ago. The thing that struck me
about him is that he's so consummately wise--wise enough, Mrs. Marcella,
to grasp at the significance of an amoeba as well as that of the Lord of
Hosts! I'm a small man--a little G.P. in an obscure Highland village in
rather shabby tweed knickerbockers and Inverness cape (yes, the same
ones--still no new clothes! What would be the use in wasting money on
adorning an old ruffian like me?) But I went up to him, sort of shaking
at the knees, after the second lecture, and discussed a point with him.
The point was not what I was wanting to know about. I was wanting, very
much, to have a 'bit crack' with him, as they call it here. Lassie, he
asked me to lunch with him the next day, and he talked to me as if I was
his long-lost brother. In fact, he seems to think that everybody is! He
came off the rostrum completely. Even when he's lecturing he seems to be
talking to you personally, with an engaging sort of friendliness. He
puts me a good bit in mind of Professor Craigie when I was a lad. I felt
as if I was a baby in arms beside him, but he seemed as pleased to see
me as I was to see him. No, he hasn't got a long white beard, and he
doesn't look a bit like Ruskin or Tennyson or Dickens. Do you remember
when you said you thought he had bushy eyebrows and a white beard, years
ago?