"This is the library" said Mr. Hancock leading Miriam along from the landing at the top of the wide red-carpeted staircase. It seemed a vast room--rooms leading one out of the other, lit with soft red lights and giving a general effect of redness, dull crimson velvet in a dull red glow and people, standing in groups and walking about--a quite new kind of people. Miriam glanced at her companion. He looked in place; he was in his right place; these were his people; people with gentle enlightened faces and keen enlightened faces. They were all alike in some way. If the room caught fire there would be no panic. They were gentle, shyly gentle or pompously gentle, but all the same and in agreement because they all knew everything, the real important difficult things. Some of them were discussing and disagreeing; many of the women's faces had questions and disagreements on them and they were nearly all worn with thought; but they would disagree in a way that was not quarrelsome, because everyone in the room was sure of the importance of the things they were discussing ... they were all a part of science.... "Science is always right and the same, religion cannot touch it or be reconciled with it, theories may modify or cancel each other but the methods of science are one and unvarying. To question that fundamental truth is irreligious" ... these people were that in the type of their minds--one and unvarying; always looking out at something with gentle intelligence or keen intelligence ... this was Alma's world ... it would be something to talk to Alma about. There was something they were not. They were not ... jolly. They could not be. They would never stop "looking." Culture and refinement; with something about it that made them quite different to the worldly people, a touch of rawness, raw school harshness about them that was unconscious of itself and could not come to life. Their shoulders and the backs of their heads could never come to life. It gave them a kind of deadness that was quite unlike the deadness of the worldly people, not nearly so dreadful--rather funny and likable. One could imagine them all washing, very carefully, in an abstracted way still looking and thinking and always with the advancement of science on their minds; never really aware of anything behind or around them because of the wonders of science. Seeing these people changed science a little. They were almost something tremendous; but not quite. 5