"Some of us cut more sharply at life than you think," he said, plumbing her unspoken sense. She had never met a man before who understood just how a girl can feel the slow obtuseness of his sex. It was almost as if he had found her out at something. "Oh," she said, "perhaps you do," and looked at him with an increased interest. "I'm half-feminine, I believe," he said. "For instance, I've got just a woman's joy in textures and little significant shapes. I know how you feel about that. I can spend hours, even now, in crystal gazing--I don't mean to see some silly revelation of some silly person's proceedings somewhere, but just for the things themselves. I wonder if you have ever been in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and looked at Ruskin's crystal collection? I saw it when I was a boy, and it became--I can't help the word--an obsession. The inclusions like moss and like trees, and all sorts of fantastic things, and the cleavages and enclosures with little bubbles, and the lights and shimmer--What were we talking about? Oh, about the keen way your feminine perceptions cut into things. And yet somehow I was throwing contempt on the feminine intelligence. I don't do justice to the order of my thoughts. Never mind. We've lost the thread. But I wish you knew my mother." He went on while Marjorie was still considering the proper response to this. "You see, I'm her only son and she brought me up, and we know each other--oh! very well. She helps with my work. She understands nearly all of it. She makes suggestions. And to this day I don't know if she's the most original or the most parasitic of creatures. And that's the way with all women and girls, it seems to me. You're as critical as light, and as undiscriminating.... I say, do I strike you as talking nonsense?" "Not a bit," said Marjorie. "But you do go rather fast." "I know," he admitted. "But somehow you excite me. I've been with Solomonson a week, and he's dull at all times. It was that made me take out that monoplane of his. But it did him no good." He paused. "They told me after the exam.," said Marjorie, "you knew more about crystallography--than anyone." "Does that strike you as a dull subject?" "No," said Marjorie, in a tone that invited justifications. "It isn't. I think--naturally, that the world one goes into when one studies molecular physics is quite the most beautiful of Wonderlands.... I can assure you I work sometimes like a man who is exploring a magic palace.... Do you know anything of molecular physics?" "You examined me," said Marjorie.