Whereat he seemed to
flare up!
"Ah!--you--I believe yes! But she?" he waved his hand in fierce unbelief.
I awoke concerned, and got myself to sleep again only by remembering the
utter absence of vanity in the Baron himself. I lay smiling in the dark to
think how much less all our verbal caressings were worth to him than the
drone of the most familiar beetle, and how his life-long delving in books
and nature had opened up this fairy world to him only at the cost of
shutting up all others. If education means calling forth and perfecting
our powers and affections, he was ten times more uneducated than his wife,
even as we knew her then. He appeared to care no more for human interests,
far or near, in large or small, than a crab cares for the stars. I fell
asleep chuckling in remembrance of an occasion when Mrs. Fontenette,
taking her cue from me, spoke to him of his plant-and-insect lore as one
of the many worlds there are within _the_ world, no more displacing it
than light displaces air, or than fragrance displaces form or sound. He
made her say it all over again, and then asked: "Vhere vas dat?"
His whole world was not really as wide as Gregory's island was to its
gentle hermit. No butterfly raptures for him; he devoured the one kind of
facts he cared for, as a caterpillar devours leaves.
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