" Mrs.
Fontenette asking to be shown one of them, they reopened the book
together, she all consciousness as she bent against him over the page, he
oblivious of everything but the phrase they were hunting. He gave his
forehead a tap of despair as he showed where the book called this same
Tillandsia, or Spanish moss, a parasite.
"It iss no baraseet," he explained, in a mellow falsetto, "it iss an
epipheet!"
"An air-plant!" said his fair worshipper, softly drinking in a bosomful of
gladness as she made the distance between them more discreet.
Distances were all one to him. He seemed like a burnt log, still in shape
but gone to ashes, except in one warm spot where glowed this self-
consuming, world-sacrificing adoration of knowledge; knowledge sought, as
I say, purely for its own sake and narrowed down to names and technical
descriptions. Men of _perverted_ principles and passions you may find
anywhere; but I never had seen anyone so totally undeveloped in all the
emotions, affections, tastes that make life _life_.
IV
A few afternoons later I went to his house. For pretext I carried a huge
green worm, but I went mainly to see just how unluckily he was married. He
was not at home. I found his partner a small, bright, toil-worn, pretty
woman of hardly twenty-eight or nine, whose two or three children had died
in infancy, and who had blended wifehood and motherhood together, and was
taking care of the Baron as a widow would care for a crippled son, and at
the same time reverencing him as if he were a demigod.
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