"What has kept you in this dreary city, Doctor Isaacson," she said. "I thought I was absolutely alone in it."
"People are still thinking they are ill."
"And you are still telling them they are not?"
"That depends!"
"I believe you have adopted that idea, that no one is ill, as a curative method. And really there may be something in it. I fancied I was ill. You told me I was well. Since that day something--your influence, I suppose--seems to have made me well. I think I believe in you--as a doctor."
"Why spoil everything by concluding with a reservation?"
"Oh, but your career is you!"
"You think I have sunk my humanity in ambition?"
"Well, you are in town on Bank Holiday!"
"In town to call on you!"
"You were so sure of finding me on such a day?"
She sent him a look which mocked him.
"But, seriously," she continued, "does not the passion for science in you dominate every other passion? For science--and what science brings you?"
With a sure hand she had touched his weak point. He had the passion to acquire, and through his science of medicine he acquired.
"You cannot expect me to allow that I am dominated by anything," he answered. "A man will seldom make a confession of slavery even to himself, if he really is a man."
"Oh, you really are a man, but you have in you something of the woman."
"How do you know that?"
"I don't know it; I feel it."
"Feeling is woman's knowledge."
"And what is man's?"
"Do women think he has any?"
"Some men have knowledge--dangerous men, like you."
"In what way am I dangerous?"
"If I tell you, you will be more so. I should be foolish to lead you to your weapons."
"You want no leading to yours."
It was, perhaps, almost an impertinence; but he felt she would not think it so, and in this he accurately appraised her taste, or lack of taste. Delicacy, reverence, were not really what she wanted of any man. Nigel might pray to a pale Madonna; Isaacson dealt with a definitely blunted woman of the world. And in his intercourse with people, unless indeed he loved them, he generally spoke to their characters, did not hold converse with his own, like a man who talks to himself in an unlighted room.
She smiled.
"Few women do, if they have any."
"Is any woman without them?"
"Yes, one."
"Name her."
"The absolutely good woman."
For a moment he was silent, struck to silence by the fierceness of her cynicism, a fierceness which had leapt suddenly out of her as a drawn sword leaps from its sheath.