with a defiant energy and will.

He was working now at bacteriology under Sir Martin Crozier. Covered
with a white linen coat, in a white-washed room of inconceivable
cleanness, surrounded by test-tubes and mixing jars, Eliot spent the
best part of the day handling the germs of the deadliest diseases;
making cultures, examining them under the microscope; preparing
vaccines. He went home to the brown velvety, leathery study in his
Welbeck Street flat to write out his notes, or read some monograph on
inoculation; or he dined with a colleague and talked to him about
bacteria.

At this period of his youth Eliot had more than ever the appearance of
inhuman preoccupation. His dark, serious face detached itself with a
sort of sullen apathy from the social scene. He seemed to have no keen
interests beyond his slides and mixing jars and test-tubes. Women, for
whom his indifference had a perverse fascination, said of him: "Dr.
Fielding isn't interested in people, only in their diseases. And not
really in diseases, only in their germs."

They never suspected that Eliot was passionate, and that a fierce pity
had driven him into his profession. The thought of preventable disease
filled him with fury; he had no tolerance for the society that tolerated
it. He suffered because he had a clearer vision and a profounder sense
of suffering than most persons. Up to the time of his father's death all
Eliot's suffering had been other people's. He couldn't rest till he had
done something to remove the cause of it.

Add to this an insatiable curiosity as to causes, and you have the main
bent of Eliot's mind.

And it seemed to him that there was nobody but Anne who saw that hidden
side of him. _She_ knew that he was sorry for people, and that being
sorry for them had made him what he was, like Jerrold and yet unlike
him. Eliot was attracted to suffering by the same sensitiveness that
made Jerrold avoid everything once associated with it.

And so the very thing that Jerrold couldn't bear to remember was what
drew Eliot closer to Anne. He saw her as Jerrold had seen her, moving,
composed and competent, in his father's room; he saw her stooping over
him to help him, he saw the specks of blood on her white sleeve; and he
thought of her with the more tenderness. From that instant he really
loved her. He wanted Anne as he had never conceived himself wanting any
woman. He could hardly remember his first adolescent feeling for her,
that confused