“He is,” he continued with a warmer, more personal note, “a very distinguished biologist; his investigations, his conclusions, have been invaluable.” He glanced at an incongruous, minute, jewelled watch on his wrist, and continued more quickly. “Ten years ago he should have stopped all work, vegetated--he was burning up rapidly; merely a reduced amount of labor would have accomplished little for his health or subject. And we couldn't spare his labor, no mere prolongation of life would have justified that loss of knowledge, progress. It was his position; he insisted upon it and we concurred... he chose... insanity.
“Miss Annot is not aware of this; he must have every moment possible; every note is priceless. The end will come--now, at any time.” He had reached the small, canary yellow Dreux landaulet waiting for him, and stepped into it with a sharp nod. “You may expect violence,” he added, as the car gathered momentum.
But that evening in the dim quietude of the piazza the biologist seemed to have recovered completely his mental poise. He spoke in a buoyant vein of the great men he had known, celebrated names in the world of the arts, in politics and science. He recalled Braisted, the astronomer, searching relaxation in the Boulevard school of French fictionists. “I told him,” he chuckled at the mild, scholastic humor, “that he had been peeping too long at Venus.”
Annot was steeped in an inscrutable silence.
For the first time, Anthony was actually aware of her features: she had a broad, low brow swept by the coppery hair loosely tied at the back; her eyes resembled her father's, they were amber-colored, and singularly candid in their interest in all that passed before them; while her nose tilted up slightly above a mouth frankly large. It was the face of a boy, he decided, but felt instantly that he had fallen far short of the fact--the allurement, the perfection, of her youthful maturity hung overwhelmingly about her the challenge of sex.
Rather, she was all girl, he recognized, but of a new variety. A vision of _the nice_ girls he had known dominated his vision, flooded his mind, all smiling with veiled eyes, clothed in a thousand reserves, fluttering graces, innocent wiles, with their gaze firmly set toward the shining, desirable goal of matrimony. Eliza was not like that, it was true; but she, from the withdrawn, impersonal height of her cool perfection, was a law to herself. There was a new freedom in Annot's acceptance of life, he realized vaguely, as different as possible from mere license; no one, he was certain, would presume with Annot Hardinge: her very frankness offered infinitely less incentive to unlawful thoughts than the conscious modesty of the others.