I shan't want
anything else for some hours yet.'

'A bun? What made you have a bun?' said Helen, laughing.

'Well, it seemed to go with the place, somehow,' said Franklin.

'I can imagine that it might; I've only been there once; very large and
very indigestible I found it, and most depressing. Yes, I see that it
might make a bun seem suitable.'

'Ah, but it's a very wonderful place, you know,' Franklin said. 'I
should have expected you to go oftener; you care about beauty.'

'Not beauty in a museum. I don't like museums. The mummies were what
impressed me most, after the Elgin marbles, and everything there seemed
like a mummy--dead and desecrated. Well, what have you been doing
besides eating buns at the British Museum? Has London been working you
very hard?'

'I've not seen much of London while you've been away,' said Franklin,
who had drawn a chair to the other side of the fire. 'I think that you
are London to me, and when you are out of it it doesn't seem to mean
much--beyond museums and work.'

'Come, what of all your scientific friends?'

'They don't mean London; they mean science,' said Franklin, smiling back
at her. She always made him feel happy for himself, and at ease, even
when he was feeling unhappy for her; and just now he was feeling
strangely, deeply unhappy for her. It wasn't humility, in the usual
sense, that showed his coming offer to him as so inadequate; he did not
think of himself as unworthy; but he did think of himself as
incongruous; and that this fine, sad, subtle creature should be brought,
from merely reasonable motives, to taking the incongruous intimately
into her life made him more unhappy for her than usual. He wished he
wasn't so incongruous; he wished he had something besides friendship and
millions; he wished, almost, that his case was hopeless and that
friendship and millions would not gain her. Yet, under these wishes,
which made his face look tired and jaded, was another feeling; it was
too selfless to be called a wish; rather it was a wonder, deep and
melancholy, as to what was being done to him, and what would be done, as
an end of it all. That something had been done he knew; it was because
of Helen--that was one thing at last seen clearly--that he had not, long
ago, left London.

'Science is perfectly impersonal, perfectly cosmopolitan, you know,' he
went on. 'Now you are intensely personal and intensely local.'

'I don't think of myself as London, then, if I'm local