NOT long after, at breakfast, the young and disdainful maid conveyed to Anthony a request to proceed, when he had finished, to the conservatory. There he discovered Annot Har-dinge, with her sleeves rolled up above her vigorous elbows, dusting with a fine, brown powder the rows of monotonous, potted plants. She directed him to follow her with a slender-nosed watering pot. He wondered silently at the featureless display of what he found to be ordinary bean plants, some of the dwarf variety, others drawn up against the wall. They bore in exact, minute inscriptions, strange names and titles, cryptic numbers; some, he saw, were labelled “Dominants,” others, “Recessives.”

“The 'cupids' are doing wretchedly, poor dears!” she exclaimed before a row of dwarf sweet peas. “This is my father's laboratory,” she told him briefly.

“I thought he had something to do with Darwin and the missing link.”

She gazed at him pityingly from the heights of a vast superiority. “Darwin did some valuable preliminary work,” she instructed him; “although Wallace really guessed it all first. Now Mendel, Bateson, are the important names. They were busy with the beginnings; and, among the beginnings, plants are the most suggestive.” She indicated a small row of budding sweet peas. “Perhaps, in those flowers, the whole secret of the universe will be found; perhaps the mystery of our souls will be explained; isn't it thrilling! The secret of inheritance may sleep in those buds—if they are white it will prove... oh, a thousand things, and among them that father is the most wonderful scientist alive; it will explain heredity and control it, make a new kind of world possible, a world without the most terrible diseases. What church, what saint, what god, has really done that?” she demanded. “Stupid priggish figures bending out of their gold-plated heavens!”

Her enthusiasm communicated a thrill to him as he regarded the still, withdrawn mystery of the plants. For the first time he thought of them as alive, as he was alive; he imagined them returning his gaze, his interest, exchanging—critically, in their imperceptible, chaste tongue—their unimpassioned opinions of him. It was a disturbing possibility that the secret of his future, of life and death, might lurk in the flowers to unfold on those slender stems. He was oppressed by a feeling of a world crowded with invisible, living forms, of fields filled with billions of grassy inhabitants, of seas, mountains, made up of interlocking and contending lives; every breath, he felt, absorbed races of varied individuals. He thought, too, of people as plants, as roses—Oh, Eliza!—as nettles, rank weeds, crimson lilies. And, vaguely, this hurt him; something valuable, something sustaining, vanished from his unformulated, instinctive conception of life; the world of men, their aims, their courage, ideals, lost their peculiar beauty, their importance; the past, rising from the mold through those green tubes and vanishing into a future of dissolving gases, shrunk, stripped of its glamor, to an affair of little moment.

Outside, as he descended the lawn, the sun had the artificial glitter of an incandescent light; the trees waved their arms at him threateningly. Then, with a shrug of his normal young shoulders, he relinquished the entire conception; he forgot it. He recklessly permeated a universe of airy atoms with the smoke of a Dulcina. “That's a woolly delusion,” he pronounced.

That evening he burnished the car, and mounted the ladder to his room late. But the evening following, detained to perform a trivial task, found him seated upon the porch, enveloped in the fragrant clouds of Habana leaf.