“I don’t understand half of what I read,” Christie began, speaking with extreme precision. “All I know is that every one of those old books has its own atmosphere for me.”

“Atmosphere?” questioned Wolf.

“I suppose it’s funny to talk in such a way,” she went on, “but all these queer nonhuman abstractions, like Spinoza’s ‘substance’ and Leibnitz’s ‘monads’ and Hegel’s ‘idea,’ don’t stay hard and logical to me. They seem to melt.”

She stopped and looked at Wolf with a faint smile, as if deprecating her extravagant pedantry.

“What do you mean⁠—melt?” he murmured.

“I mean as I say,” she answered, with a shade of querulousness, as if the physical utterance of words were difficult to her and she expected her interlocutor to get her meaning independently of them. “I mean they turn into what I call ‘atmosphere.’ ”