“That man could alter the world,” he said, turning to her somewhat constrainedly at last. “I do not pretend to be an expert in more than one or two of the sciences we touched on, but I know enough to recognize that what he says is of first-class importance. Do you understand, my dear girl, that he has discovered all we know in physiology by pure contemplation? I would go farther and guess that physiology is no problem to him at all; he simply perceives the nature of the body, and it is my opinion that he will live for ever. There seems practically no nervous expenditure. He avails himself of some sort of cosmical energy and forgets about his own organization, which has become merely the sphere, so to speak, in which the energy I speak of is present. And I don’t mind confessing that I am completely baffled in my own branch. He talks, Lychnis, as if he had experienced everything he knows, as if he actually saw, felt, even heard, physical reality. He proceeds, as it were, from insight; and, really, there doesn’t seem to be anything hidden. Odd, if reality should, after all, be something more than a state of affairs in a field of electrical stresses. It is profoundly disconcerting. It is as if the most refined discoveries of science should prove to be familiar to an ape or to an idiot. They are ape-like, these friends of yours, and a trifle idiotic. I am not an anthropologist—not an expert—but I perceive something orangoid in your friends, in the disposition, for example, of the lower limbs horizontally, in the posture of the hands.” Sir Richard, forgetting his constraint, seemed to ask for sympathy; but she was angry with him for his frame of mind towards her, and made only some brief reply. 33