The Lad was a great comfort to me.
I had for several days been conscious of the presence of a new-comer in
the house. He was a young Southerner, with fine dark eyes, and
extraordinary alertness of body.
There was something in the stranger’s face that pleased me. Perhaps it
was his resolute mouth and a certain air of high-mindedness. Perhaps it
was only the boyish way in which his soft hair waved back from his
forehead.
I called him “the Lad,” because he looked so young by the side of the
Man of the World.
One day as I was talking with my friend, the Butterfly Hunter, I was
startled by being told that the Lad had done some brilliant scientific
work, and had already made for himself a reputation.
“He is only a boy!” I exclaimed.
“He is a man of twenty-seven,” said the Lad, who had come in unnoticed.
After that we became acquainted rapidly.
I had never seen anybody so keenly alive. He was eager, restless,
quivering with vitality. There was a kind of ferocity in his way of
working; he was busy finishing a book, with a name occupying two lines.
I do not yet know what it means. And he walked every day for miles,
coming home hungry and tired.
I found myself trying to classify him. I had fallen into the habit of
classifying everybody. Was he more interested in his own soul, I
wondered, or in the oppression of the working-man?
My astonishment was very great to discover that he rarely thought about
his soul, and that he was not trying to reform anything.
This was partly because he was so busy. His whole effort was centred in
his work, and everything else was crowded out.
“I feel the strength of my youth upon me,” he said one day, “but I have
done so little, and the days are so short.”
Before I knew it I was taking long walks with the Lad, by the bridges
over the tidal river north of the city, or eastward by the shipping and
the sea. We watched the sailing of out-bound vessels, and the landing of
emigrants from returning ships.
He told me about his father and his sister. He talked, too, a great deal
about his work, insisted on talking about it, although he knew that I
could not understand him.
I presently came to be a kind of maiden aunt to him. I gave him advice
on various matters. I introduced him to Janet and the Doctor and the
Altruist, who all regarded him as a new and interesting specimen.
The longer I knew him, the more he cheered me. There was something in
his very presence that was like the coming of the young west wind.