“Poor chap; what a stupidity is this question.” Miriam smiled solicitously, but she had travelled back enraptured across nine years to the day, now only yesterday, of her first meeting with her newly recovered word. Jevons. From the first the sienna brown volume had been wonderful, the only one of the English books that had any connection with life; and that day, Sunday afternoon prep in the dining-room, with the laburnum and pink may outside the window changing as she read from a tantalising reproach to a vivid encirclement of her being by all the spring scenes she had lived through, coming and going, the sight and scent and shimmering movement of them, as if she moved, bodiless and expanded, about in their midst. Something about the singing, lifting word appearing suddenly on the page, even before she had grasped its meaning, intensified the relation to life of the little hard motionless book, leaving it, when she had read on, centred round the one statement; the rest remaining in shadow, interesting but in some strange way ill-gotten. The recovery of the forgotten word at the centre of “the philosophical problems of the present day” cast a fresh glow of reality across her schooldays. The efforts she had so blindly made, so indolently and prodigally sacrificing her chances of success in the last examination, to the few things that had made the world shine about her, had been in some way right, with a shapeliness and fruitfulness of their own. Her struggles with Jevons had been bread cast upon the waters ...... how differently the word now fell into her mind, with “intuition” happily at home there to keep it company. If materialism could be supported empirically, there was something in it, something in matter that had not yet been found out...... Meantime philosophy proved God. And Hegel had not brushed away the landscape. There was God _and_ the landscape. “Materialism isn’t dead _yet_” she heard herself say recklessly. “More. Chemistry will yet carry us further than this kind of metaphysical surmising.” Taking part, even being with someone who took part in the proceedings, altered them. Some hidden chain of evidence was broken. Things no longer stood quietly in the air for acceptance or rejection. The memory of the evening would be a memory of social life, isolated revelations of personality. CHAPTER VIII