Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/190

  We discussed the early labors of these masters, until soon I was soaring in heights of professional exaltation which made me quite oblivious to the other discussion being carried on in the shadow by these two savages, whose vigorous young bodies, with their attendant embryonic psychic impulses, were at a phase so many thousands of years ahead, or perhaps behind, our own epoch of mental autocracy. Here was this woman with the beauty, temperament, and principles, no doubt, of Helen of Troy, and mind enough to go after what she wanted; Stewart an avatar of Jove himself, the sire of all profligates, but with mind enough to smirch his classic duality; myself, all cerebrum, ultra mental and analytic, perhaps because my blood was just ridding itself of millions of sporulating plasmodia; the Count, who had at some time, I fancy, swung in the orbits of the lot of us. He certainly had the mind, and he had had the body before he gave it to his mind to squander, and it seemed to me, as I pulled up [ 174 ]