“I heard, I heard,” cried Miriam.
“Yes; but excuse a moment. Really it is interstink. He is one of the most fine lecturours of Sorbonne; membre de l’Académie ; the soobject is l’Attention . Ah it is better we shall speak in French.”
“ Nur auf deutsch kann man gut philosophieren ,” quoted Miriam disagreeing with the maxim and hoping he would not ask where she had read it.
“That is not so; that is a typical German arrogance. The French have some most distinguished p‑sychologues, Taine, and more recently, Tarde. But listen.”
Miriam listened to the description of the lecture. For a while he kept to his careful slow English and her attention was divided between her growing interest in the nature of his mistakes, her desire to tell him that she had discovered that he spoke Norman English in German idiom with an intonation that she supposed must be Russian, and the fascination of watching for the fall of the dead-white, black-fringed eyelids on to the brooding face, between the framing of each sentence. When he passed into French, led by a quotation which was evidently the core of the lecture, she saw the lecturer, and his circle of students and indignantly belaboured him for making, and them for quietly listening to the assertion that it is curious that the human faculty of attention should have originated in women.
Certainly she would not read the pamphlet. However clever the man might be, his assumptions about women made the carefully arranged and solemnly received display of research, irritatingly valueless. And Mr. Shatov seemed to agree, quite as a matter of course. … “Why should he be surprised ?” she said when he turned for her approval. “ How , surprised,” he asked laughing, an easy deep bass chuckle, drawing his small mouth wide and up at the corners; a row of small square even teeth shining out.