‘Just about. I have got down below the surface, and am beginning to feel the joys of digging;’ and Robert threw back his head with one of his most brilliant, enthusiastic smiles. ‘I have been shy about boring you with the thing, but the fact is, I am very keen indeed; and this library has been a godsend!’ ‘So I should think.’ Langham sat down on one of the carved wooden stools placed at intervals along the bookcases and looked at his friend, his psychological curiosity rising a little. ‘Tell me,’ he said presently--‘tell me what interests you specially--what seizes you--in a subject like the making of France, for instance?’ ‘Do you really want to know?’ said Robert, incredulously. The other nodded. Robert left his place, and began to walk up and down, trying to answer Langham’s questions, and at the same time to fix in speech a number of sentiments and impressions bred in him by the work of the past few months. After a while Langham began to see his way. Evidently the forces at the bottom of this new historical interest were precisely the same forces at work in Elsmere’s parish plans, in his sermons, in his dealings with the poor and the young forces of imagination and sympathy. What was enchaining him to this new study was not, to begin with, that patient love of ingenious accumulation which is the learned temper proper, the temper, in short, of science. It was simply a passionate sense of the human problems which underlie all the dry and dusty detail of history and give it tone and color, a passionate desire to rescue something more of human life from the drowning, submerging past, to realize for himself and others the solidarity and continuity of mankind’s long struggle from the beginning until now.