“Ach-ma,” he sighed, with shining eyes, looking happily replete, “he is a _great_ p-sycho-physiologiste,” and passed on to eager narration of the events of his week in Paris. Listening to the strange inflections of his voice, the curiously woven argumentative sing-song tone, as if he were talking to himself, broken here and there by words thrown out with explosive vehemence, breaking defiantly short as if to crush opposition in anticipation, and then again the soft almost plaintive sing-song beginning of another sentence, Miriam presently heard him mention Max Nordau and learned that he was something more than the author of Degeneration. He had written Die Conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, which she immediately must read. He had been to see him and found a truly marvellous white-haired old man, with eyes, _alive_; so young and vigorous in his enthusiasm that he made Mr. Shatov at twenty-two feel _old_. After that she watched him from afar, set apart from his boyhood, alone with her twenty-five years on the borders of middle-age. _There_ was the secret of the youthful untested look that showed in certain poses of his mature studious head. His beard and his courtly manner and the grave balanced intelligence of his eyes might have belonged to a man of forty. Perhaps the Paris visit had been some time ago. No; he had come through France for the first time on his way to England.... She followed him, growing weary with envy, through his excursions in Paris with his father; went at last to the Louvre, mysterious grey building, heavy above a row of shops, shutting in works of “art,” in some extraordinary way understood, and known to be “good”; and woke to astonishment to find him sitting alone, his father impatiently gone back to the hotel, for an hour in motionless contemplation of the Venus, having _wept_ at the first sight of her in the distance. The impression of the Frenchman’s lecture was driven away. All the things she had heard of on these two evenings were in the past. He was in England now, through all the wonders of his continental life, England had beckoned him. Paris had been just a stage on his confident journey; and the first event of his London life would be Saturday’s visit to the British Museum. His eager foreign interest would carry the visit off .... and she remembered, growing in the thought suddenly animated towards his continued discourse, that she could show him the Elgin Marbles. * * * * *