Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/60

50 said presently. The Count rose, took down a book and looked out the passage. It was getting near to ten o'clock and I was becoming anxious; but by a quarter-past ten it was obvious that we had succeeded. By half-past ten Jacques' announcement that the post had arrived was received with a loud "Hurrah!" echoed by us all, even the Count, although he did not raise his eyes from a volume of Hegel he had taken up after finishing his copy.

"Now for more breakfast!" cried George.

"There are heaps of ham and things," said Marcelle; "we will devour them all."

They went off to the dining-room noisy and cheerful, and I was left with my host.

"That line of thought is new to you?" he said, looking up from his book.

"All thought is new to me, I think," I said humbly.

"No," he said, "it is not so, or you could not have responded like that. How many English or French girls would have found such an article in the least interesting!"

"But I don't understand it," I said, flattered, but trying to be sincere.

I certainly did not then, and do not now comprehend all he said to me that morning, but the mental sensations were wonderful. He talked to me at first of Kant, then, I think, of Hegel, and lastly, and most of all, of Comte. I can only compare the effect on my young mind to the effect of stretching on an india-rubber band. And yet, although I was taken much too far and left slack afterwards, I was intensely happy.

We wandered out into the garden. I might have been an old philosopher, a thinker and student; he treated me exactly as an equal, and to a girl uneducated by poor Miss Mills it was absolutely intoxicating. It added to the excitement that it was the first time he had taken any notice of me. I knew from Marcelle how rarely he was seen before