The Wonder had a very expressionless face, but I thought at this moment that he wore a look of sadness; and that look was one of the factors which helped me to understand the unbridgeable gulf that lay between his intellect and mine. I think it was at this moment that I first began to change my opinion. I had been regarding him as an unbearable little prig, but it flashed across me as I watched him now, that his mind and my own might be so far differentiated that he was unable to convey his thoughts to me. "Was it possible," I wondered, "that he had been trying to talk down to my level?" "I am afraid I don't quite follow you," I said. I had intended to question him further, to urge him to explain, but it came to me that it would be quite hopeless to go on. How can one answer the unreasoning questions of a child? Here I was the child, though a child of slightly advanced development. I could appreciate that it was useless to persist in a futile "Why, why?" when the answer could only be given in terms that I could not comprehend. Therefore I hesitated, sighed, and then with that obstinacy of vanity which creates an image of self-protection and refuses to relinquish it, I said: "I wish you could explain yourself; not on this particular point of philosophy, but your life----" I stopped, because I did not know how to phrase my demand. What was it, after all, that I wanted to learn? "That I can't explain," said the Wonder. "There are no data." I saw that he had accepted my request for explanation in a much wider sense than I had intended, and I took him up on this. "But haven't you any hypothesis?" "I cannot work on the system of trial and error," replied the Wonder. Our conversation went no further this afternoon, for Mrs. Berridge came in to lay the cloth. She looked askance, I thought, at the figure on the window-sill, but she ventured no remark save to ask if I was ready for my supper. "Yes, oh! yes!" I said. "Shall I lay for two, sir?" asked Mrs. Berridge. "Will you stay and have supper?" I said to the Wonder, but he shook his head, got up and walked out of the room. I watched him cross the farmyard and make his way over the Common. "Well!" I said to Mrs. Berridge, when the boy was out of sight, "that child is what in America they call 'the limit,' Mrs. Berridge." My landlady put her lips together, shook her head, and shivered slightly. "He gives me the shudders," she said. V I neither read nor wrote that evening. I forgot to go out for a walk at sunset. I sat and pondered until it was time for bed, and then I pondered myself to sleep. No vision came to me, and I had no relevant dreams. The next morning at seven o'clock I saw Mrs. Stott come over the Common to fetch her milk from the farm. I waited until her business was done, and then I went out and walked back with her. "I want to understand about your son," I said by way of making an opening. She looked at me quickly. "You know, 'e 'ardly ever speaks to me, sir," she said.