Looking back on it all now, I can see exactly what was happening. But I couldn't then. It puzzled me that Terry had been so concerned by what had seemed to me merely a brilliant improvisation by a born improviser. But when I told him what Severn had said about Karelsky his manner changed. He seemed rather dazed with the idea, and he insisted on taking me back to his rooms that night and showing me everything he could find that had anything to do with Karelsky. Apparently he was a scientific star of the first magnitude. There was a photograph of him in a recent number of _Discovery_, and an article by him in the _Science Review_ on the Function of the Nucleolus in the Life of the Animal Cell. His translated work "Eosinophilic Leucocytes in the Thymus of Postnatal Pigs" was, so Terry informed me, a monument of research; and he had also created a stir in the world of mathematics by a paper in a German journal on "Die Veranderlichkeit der Licht--und Farbe-Empfidnungen." Altogether he was undoubtedly a great man. We sat up till nearly two in the morning discussing Karelsky and Vienna and so on. Terry's attitude astonished me, yet, in a way, it thrilled me also; it had, if the metaphor isn't too fanciful, the austere beauty of a Greek statue. What I mean is that he was thinking of nothing--nothing at all--except his work. The idea of having anything to do with the great Karelsky had stirred in him something that had always existed but had rarely permitted itself to be seen--a sort of frozen, white-hot passion for laboratory-research. It glowed in his eyes and trembled in his voice; it burned as fiercely as the art of any artist. It would be fine, he thought, to know Karelsky, and not only to know him, but to work with him and learn from him. It would be glorious to sit at the feet of the man who had discovered no fewer than three new species of _spalax monticola_. V Helen was a lovely woman. I don't think I ever realized it more forcibly than on the afternoon that followed that End House dinner. She had asked me to tea at Rumpelmayer's, and we sat at one of the tables overlooking the plutocratic hubbub of St. James Street. "I asked Terry as well," she said, "but of course he won't come." She rather overdid the casualness of her attitude, and as soon as I looked at her she began to blush. But she kept her head, adding vivaciously: "I like Rumpelmayer's. It's the only place in London that reminds me of Ostend."