He became quite serious. "I wish you would advise me. You know so much more about the whole subject than I do. I'm eager to get to work on the books. I suppose it is too much to expect that they will come up to-day?"
"No indeed, let me go. Am I not an inmate here?" He disappeared into the house, leaving her to muse on his face. He began to interest her, this passionate, self-willed, moody youth. She perceived in him the soul of the conqueror. His swift change of temper, his union of sport-loving boy and ambitious man made him as interesting as a play. "He'll make his way," she decided, using the vague terms of prophecy into which a girl falls when regarding the future of a young man. It's all so delightfully mysterious, this path of the youth who makes his way upward to success.
A shout announced his return, and looking up she perceived him bearing down upon her with an armful of books.
"Here they are!" he exulted. "Red ones, blue ones, brown ones--which shall we begin on?"
"Agreed! Blue it is." He dumped them all down on the wide, swinging couch and fell to turning them over. "Dark blue or light blue?"
He picked up a fat volume. "_Mysterious Psychic Forces._ Know this tome?"
"Oh yes, indeed! It's wonderfully interesting."
"I choose it! This color scheme simplifies things. Now, here's another--_The Dual Personality_. How's that?"
"_Dual Personality_ to the rear. Here's a brown book--_Metaphysical Phenomena_."
"I'm sorry they didn't bind it in blue--and here's a measly, yellow, paper-bound book in some foreign language--Italian, I guess, author, Morselli."
"Oh, that's a book I want to read. Let me take it?"
"Then I engage you at once to translate that book to me. What is it all about?"
He abandoned his seat on the couch and drew a chair close to hers. "Begin at the first page and read very slowly all the way through. I wish it were a three volume edition."
She looked at him with side glance. "You're not in the least subtle."
"I intended to have you understand that I enjoy the thought of your reading to me. Did you catch it?"
"I caught it. No one else ever suggested that I was stupid."
"I didn't call you stupid. I think you're haughty and domineering, but you're not stupid."
Eventually they drew together, and she began to read the marvelous story of the crucial experiments which Morselli and his fellows laid upon Eusapia Palladino. Two hours passed. The robins and thrushes began their evensong, the shadows lengthened on the lawn, and still these young folk remained at their reading--Victor sitting so close to his teacher's side that his cheek almost touched her shoulder. The sunset glory of the material world was forgotten in the tremendous conceptions called up by the author of this far-reaching book.