and scientifically accurate descriptions of the smallest
subjects. It was the work he placed before her that held Helen May
abashed before his vast knowledge. She could not understand half of what
she deciphered and typed for him, and because she could not understand
she realized the depth of her benightedness.

She was awed by the breadth and the scope which she sensed more or less
vaguely in _The Evolution of Sociology_. Holman Sommers quoted freely,
and discussed boldly and frankly, such abstruse authors as Descartes,
Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Comte, Gumplowicz, some of them names she had
never heard of and could not even spell without following her copy
letter by letter. Holman Sommers seemed to have read all of them and to
have weighed all of them and to be able to quote all of them offhand;
whereas Schopenhauer was the only name in the lot that sounded in the
least familiar to Helen May, and she had a guilty feeling that she had
always connected the name with music instead of the sort of things
Holman Sommers quoted him as having said or written, she could not make
out which.

Helen May, therefore, was suffering from mental growing pains. She
struggled with new ideas which she had swallowed whole, without any
previous elementary knowledge of the subject. Her brain was hungry, her
life was stagnant, and she seized upon these sociological problems which
Holman Sommers had placed before her, and worried over them, and wondered
where Holman Sommers had learned so much about things she had never heard
of. Save his vocabulary, which wearied her, he was the simplest, the
kindest of men, though not kind as her Man of the Desert was kind.

Just here in her thoughts Holman Sommers faded, and Starr's lean,
whimsical face came out sharply defined before her mental vision. Starr
certainly was different! Ordinary, and not educated much beyond the three
Rs, she suspected. Just a desert man with a nice voice and a gift for
provocative little silences. Two men could not well be farther apart in
personality, she thought, and she amused herself by comparing them.

For instance, take the case of Pat. Sommers had told her just why and
just how desperately she needed a dog for the goats, and had urged her by
all means to get one at the first opportunity. Starr had not said
anything about it; he had simply brought the dog. Helen May appreciated
the different quality of the kindness that does things.

Privately, she suspected that Star