white, tremulous, determined features, the childlike openness of the broad forehead, the brilliant gentle deprecating eyes, familiar handsome unknown kindliness gleaming out between the high arch of rich black hair and the small black sharply-pointed French beard; the change in the light of the cold room with the sound of the warm deep voice; the few well-chosen struggling words; scholarship; that strange sense that foreigners bring, of knowing and being known, but without the irony of the French or the plebeianism of Germans and Scandinavians, bringing a consciousness of being on trial, but without responsibility. …
The trial would bring exposure. Reading and discussion would reveal ignorance of English literature. …
The hour of sitting accepted as a student, talking easily, the right phrases remembering themselves in French and German, would not come again; the sudden outbreak of happiness after mentioning Renan … how had she suddenly known that he made the Old Testament like a newspaper? Parfaitement ; j’ai toujours été fort intéressé dans la philosophie . After reading so long ago, not understanding at the time and knowing she would only remember, without words, something that had come from the pages. Perhaps that was how students learned; reading and getting only a general impression and finding thoughts and words years afterwards; but then how did they pass examinations?
For that moment they had been students together, exchanging photographs of their minds. That could not come again. It was that moment that had sent him away at the end of the lesson, plunging lightly upstairs, brumming in his deep voice, and left her singing in the drawing-room … the best way would be to consider him as something superfluous, to be forgotten all day and presently, perhaps quite soon, to disappear altogether. … But before her exposure brought the lessons to an end and sent him away to find people who were as learned as he was, she would have heard more. Tomorrow he would bring down the