inary magic and delicacy of phrase. There was something in him
which found a kind of pleasure in the long analysis, which took pains
that it should be infinitely well done.

Rose followed him breathlessly. If she had known more of literature she
would have realized that she was witnessing a masterly dissection of one
of those many morbid growths of which our nineteenth-century psychology
is full. But she was anything but literary, and she could not analyze
her excitement. The man's physical charm, his melancholy, the intensity
of what he said, affected, unsteadied her as music was apt to affect
her. And through it all there was the strange, girlish pride that this
should have befallen _her_; a first crude intoxicating sense of the
power over human lives which was to be hers, mingled with a desperate
anxiety to be equal to the occasion, to play her part well.

'So you see,' said Langham at last, with a great effort (to do him
justice) to climb back on to some ordinary level of conversation; 'all
these transcendentalisms apart, I am about the most unfit man in
the world for a college tutor. The undergraduates regard me as a
shilly-shallying pedant. On my part,' he added dryly, 'I am not slow
to retaliate. Every term I live I find the young man 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 out 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