mixture of ignorant desire and fear, so different was it
from the intense, clear passion that possessed him now. At night when
his work was done, he lay in bed, not sleeping, thinking of Anne with
desire that knew itself too well to be afraid. Anne was the one thing
necessary to him beside his work, necessary as a living part of himself.
She could only not come before his work because Eliot's work came before
himself and his own happiness. When he went down every other week-end to
Wyck-on-the-Hill he knew that it was to see Anne.

His mother knew it too.

"I wish Eliot would marry," she said.

"Why?" said Anne.

"Because then he wouldn't be so keen on going off to look for germs in
disgusting climates."

Anne wondered whether Adeline knew Eliot. For Eliot talked to her about
his work as he walked with her at a fine swinging pace over the open
country, taking all his exercise now while he could get it. That was
another thing he liked about Anne Severn, her splendid physical fitness;
she could go stride for stride with him, and mile for mile, and never
tire. Her mind, too, was robust and active, and full of curiosity; it
listened by the hour and never tired. It could move, undismayed, among
horrors. She could see, as he saw, the "beauty" of the long trains of
research by which Sir Martin Crozier had tracked down the bacillus of
amoebic dysentery and established the difference between typhoid and
Malta fever.

Once started on his subject, the grave, sullen Eliot talked excitedly.

"You do see, Anne, how thrilling it is, don't you? For me there's
nothing but bacteriology. I always meant to go in for it, and Sir
Martin's magnificent. Absolutely top-hole. You see, all these disgusting
diseases can be prevented. It's inconceivable that they should be
tolerated in a civilized country. People can't care a rap or they
couldn't sleep in their beds. They ought to get up and make a public row
about it, to insist on compulsory inoculation for everybody whether they
like it or not. It really isn't enough to cure people of diseases when
they've got them. We ought to see that they never get them, that there
aren't any to get... What we don't know yet is the complete behaviour of
all these bacteria among themselves. A bad bacillus may be doing good
work by holding down a worse one. It's conceivable that if we succeeded
in exterminating all known diseases we might release an unknown one,
supremely horrible, that would exterminate