“Now I am pairfectly happy” he said as he passed through the swing doors of the reading-room. His head was up radiantly singing, he was rushing trustfully forward, looking at nothing, carrying her on, close at his side, till they reached the barrier of the outmost catalogue desk. He pulled up facing her, with wide wild eyes looking at nothing. “We shall at once take Anaka_ray_ninna in _English_” he shouted in an enthusiastic whisper. “We must choose seats before we get books,” murmured Miriam. There was plenty to do and explain; the revelation of her meagre attack on the riches of the library need not yet come. Were they to read together? Had he reached his goal “midst all those literatures” to spend his time in showing her Tolstoy? He followed her absently about as she filled in the time while they waited for their book, by showing all she knew of the routine of the library. “There shall of course” he said in a gruff explanatory tone, arresting her near the entrance to the central enclosure, “be a quite exhaustive system of catalogue, but I find there is too much _formalities_; with all these little baskets.” “Ssh,” begged Miriam leading him away. She drifted to the bookshelves, showing him the one shelf she knew on the south side; there was a reader on a ladder at the very shelf. “Carlyle’s French Revolution is up there” she said confidently. “Na, na,” he growled reproachfully, “this is a most purely unreliable fictional history, a tour de force from special individual prejudices. You should take rather Thiers.” She piloted him across to her shelf on the north side to point out the Revue des deux Mondes and the North American Review. He paused, searching along the shelves. “_Ah. Here_ is books.” He drew out and flung open a heavy beautifully printed volume with wide margins on the pages; she would show him the clever little folding arrangements to hold heavy volumes; “You do not know these?” he demanded of her silence; “ah that is a great pity; it is the complete discours de l’Académie française; you shall immediately read them; ah, they are the most _perfect_ modèles.” She glanced at the open page beginning “Messieurs! Le sentiment de fierté avec laquelle je vous”; it was a voice; exactly like the voice of Mr. Shatov. He stood with the heavy open volume, insisting in his dreadfully audible whisper on wonderful French names prefixed to the titles of addresses, fascinating subjects, one of them Mr. _Gladstone_! He looked French as he spoke; a brilliantly polished Frenchman. Why had he not gone to France? He was German too, with a German education and yet with some impatiently unexplained understanding and contempt--for Germany. Why was he drawn towards England? That was the mysterious thing. What was the secret of the reverence in this man towards England and the English? He was not an anarchist. There he stood, Russian, come from all that far-away beauty, with German and French culture in his mind, longingly