tion?

He too was calm, business-like, detached. He strangled a happy smile
which suggested that her question was absurd. To start a new section
was to work gloomily by himself, at some distant quarter of the room;
to write to her dictation was to be near her, soothed by her voice and
made forgetful by her eyes. Hypocritically he feigned a minute's
reflection, as if it were a matter for hesitation and for choice.

"Wouldn't you find it less tiring if I read and you wrote?"

"No, I had better read. You can write faster than I can."

So he wrote his fastest, while Lucia Harden read out titles to him in
the sonorous Latin tongue. She was standing ankle-deep in Gnostics and
Neo-Platonists; as for Mr. Rickman, he was, as he observed, out of his
depth there altogether.

"Iamblichus, _De Mysteriis Egyptiorum_. Do you know him?"

Mr. Rickman smiled as he admitted that his acquaintance with
Iamblichus was of the slightest; Lucia laughed as she confessed an
ignorance extending to the very name. He noticed that she always
seemed pleased when she had any ignorance to own up to; had she found
out that this gave pleasure to other people?

"Is he Philosophy, or is he Religion?" She invariably deferred to
Rickman on a question of classification. She handed the book to him.
"Can you tell?"

"I really don't know; he seems to be both. I'd better have a look at
him." He turned over the pages, glancing at the text. "I say, listen
to this."

He hit on a passage at random, and read out the Greek, translating
fluently.

"'If then the presence of the divine fire and the unspeakable form of
the divine light descend upon a man, wholly filling and dominating
him, and encompassing him on every side, so that he can in no way
carry on his own affairs, what sense or understanding or perception of
ordinary matters should he have who has received the divine fire?' Can
he be referring to the business capacity of poets?"

Lucia listened amused. And all the time he was thinking, "If I don't
tell her now I shall never tell her. She'll sneak off with Miss
Palliser somewhere in the afternoon." Neither noticed that Robert had
come in and was standing by with a telegram. Robert gazed at Mr.
Rickman with admiration, while he respectfully waited for the end of
the paragraph; that, he judged, being the proper moment for attracting
his mistress' attention.

Never in all his life would Rickman forget that passage in the _De
Mysteriis_ which he had no