Eric defended his Assistant. Hermione once made the slip of saying of Mr. Bootle that he looked like the kind of person she could quite imagine taking a pleasure in doing innocent animals to death.
"I shouldn't have said Bootle was the least like you," Eric said, with a deadly suavity. She saw he had not forgotten Babs' stories, but he seemed very willing not to pursue the subject.
"Everything comes to an end sometime. Even you, Lady Hermione--not to speak of the rest of us. And some of us would be content enough to know our way of dying had left the world a little more enlightened than we found it."
I minded none of Hermione's audacities so much as her speaking of Eric as "Babs' property." "Poor old Babs," she said behind her sister's back--the best the Ugly Duckling of the family could hope for was a parson, or some professor-person.
We noticed the professor-person never stayed long if the Helmstones came.
He was quite different when he was alone with us three. He was patient, and took some pains, I think, to make us understand that feeling of his about Scientific Research. He seemed to give us the key of the wonderful laboratory in London, where he "spent the greater part" of his life. I, too, came to feel it must be the most fascinating place in the world.
Not a place where men dealt only with dead matter, but where they "proved the spirit."
A friend of his had discovered things about X rays; a knowledge, Eric said, which had saved other men from death; and from what he thought was worse--long, hopeless suffering. His friend knew that he was running a risk with the X rays. He saw that the sores on his hands grew worse; they were eating in. A thumb and forefinger had to go, then the entire hand; presently, the other hand. His eyes---- Then he died.
Eric didn't seem sorry, though his voice changed and he looked away. "It was a fine way to die."
He said the self-discipline imposed by the pursuit of science had become the chief hope of the world. All the good that was in Militarism had been got out of it. It was a spent shell now, half-buried in the long grass of a fallow field. Still, it was no wonder the majority of the governing class, out of touch with the real work of the world--no wonder they still groped after the military idea.