That preliminary to setting aside his earlier reserve--a forefinger sweeping upward and outward through the red-brown thatch on his upper lip--and then telling my mother about those hours of fathoms-deep absorption; of the ray of light that, from time to time, would pierce the darkness. He told her, with something very like emotion, of the great, still gladness that came out of conquest of the smallest corner of the Hidden Field--that vast Hinterland as yet untrodden. CHAPTER X THE BUNGALOW My mother said this was the New Consecration. He is the stuff of the _devot_, she said. In another age he would have been a great ascetic, or a saint. I was thankful the temptations, in these directions, were slight for people of our time. I liked better to think of him in one of his boyish moods, helping us to re-stock our aquarium. Hermione Helmstone's inclination to mock behind his back, to imitate little stiffnesses and what she called his "Scotticisms," even Lady Barbara's unblushing _Schwaermerei_, was less a trial to me than the talk about saints and ascetics. The Helmstone girls fell into the bad habit of dropping in to share our tea and our visitor. Hermione pretended that she came solely to keep Barbara in countenance. But Hermione on these occasions did most of the talking. She didn't care what she said. "How long," she demanded, "are you going to stay?"--a heart-thumping question which none of us had ventured to put. "Three weeks." "A beggarly little while," she said, exchanging looks with her confederate. Then her malicious sympathy at his having to spend so much of his life in sick rooms and hospitals, "looking at horrors." He said, somewhat shortly, that he spent most of his life nowadays--thank God!--in a laboratory. Which was scarcely polite. "Ouf!" Hermione sniffed, "I know! Place full of bottles and bad smells." He smiled at that, and took it up with spirit. "No room in your house so clean," he said. "And no place anywhere half so interesting." A laboratory was full of mystery; yes, and of romance--oh, naturally, not _her_ kind. What did he know about "her kind"? Hermione demanded. Perhaps he knew more than we suspected. For, just as though he guessed that Hermione's name for him was "Scotch Granite," and that she lamented Barbara's always falling in love with such unromantic people, he scoffed at Hermione's conception of romance. "An ideal worthy of the servants' hall. A marble terrace by moonlight.... No? Well, then, the supper-room at the Carlton--Paris frocks, diamonds, a band banging away; and a thousand-pound motor-car waiting to whirl the happy pair away to bliss of the most expensive brand." They went on to quarrel about novels. Hermione hated the gloomy kind. For Eric's benefit she added, "And the scientific kind." "Exactly!" It was for her sort of "taste" that ample provision was made in the feuilleton of a certain paper.