Charles was therefore interested—both his future father-in-law and his uncle had taught him to step very delicately in this direction—to see whether Dr. Grogan would confirm or dismiss his solicitude for the theologians. But the doctor was unforthcoming. He stared into his fire and murmured, “They have indeed.”

There was a little silence, which Charles broke casually, as if really to keep the conversation going.

“Have you read this fellow Darwin?”

Grogan’s only reply was a sharp look over his spectacles. Then he got to his feet and taking the camphine lamp, went to a bookshelf at the back of the narrow room. In a moment he returned and handed a book to Charles. It was The Origin of Species. He looked up at the doctor’s severe eyes.

“I did not mean to imply—”

“Have you read it?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should know better than to talk of a great man as ‘this fellow.’”

“From what you said—”

“This book is about the living, Smithson. Not the dead.”

The doctor rather crossly turned to replace the lamp on its table. Charles stood.

“You are quite right. I apologize.”

The little doctor eyed him sideways.

“Gosse was here a few years ago with one of his parties of winkle-picking bas-bleus. Have you read his Omphalos?”

Charles smiled. “I found it central to nothing but the sheerest absurdity.”

And now Grogan, having put him through both a positive and a negative test, smiled bleakly in return.

“I told him as much at the end of his lecture here. Ha! Didn’t I just.” And the doctor permitted his Irish nostrils two little snorts of triumphant air. “I fancy that’s one bag of fundamentalist wind that will think twice before blowing on this part of the Dorset littoral again.” [6]

He eyed Charles more kindly.

“A Darwinian?”

“Passionately.”

Grogan then seized his hand and gripped it; as if he were Crusoe, and Charles, Man Friday; and perhaps something passed between them not so very unlike what passed unconsciously between those two sleeping girls half a mile away. They knew they were like two grains of yeast in a sea of lethargic dough—two grains of salt in a vast tureen of insipid broth.

Our two carbonari of the mind—has not the boy in man always adored playing at secret societies?—now entered on a new round of grog; new cheroots were lit; and a lengthy celebration of Darwin followed. They ought, one may think, to have been humbled by the great new truths they were discussing; but I am afraid the mood in both of them—and in Charles especially, when he finally walked home in the small hours of the morning—was one of exalted superiority, intellectual distance above the rest of their fellow creatures.

Unlit Lyme was the ordinary mass of mankind, most evidently sunk in immemorial sleep; while Charles the naturally selected (the adverb carries both its senses) was pure intellect, walking awake, free as a god, one with the unslumbering stars and understanding all.

All except Sarah, that is.

She stood obliquely in the shadows at the tunnel of ivy’s other end. She did not look round; she had seen him climbing up through the ash trees. The day was brilliant, steeped in azure, with a warm southwesterly breeze. It had brought out swarms of spring butterflies, those brimstones, orange-tips and green-veined whites we have lately found incompatible with high agricultural profit and so poisoned almost to extinction; they had danced with Charles all along his way past the Dairy and through the woods; and now one, a brilliant fleck of sulphur, floated in the luminous clearing behind Sarah’s dark figure.

Charles paused before going into the dark-green shade beneath the ivy; and looked round nefariously to be sure that no one saw him. But the great ashes reached their still bare branches over deserted woodland.

She did not turn until he was close, and even then she would not look at him; instead, she felt in her coat pocket and silently, with downcast eyes, handed him yet another test, as if it were some expiatory offering. Charles took it, but her embarrassment was contagious.

“You must allow me to pay for these tests what I should pay at Miss Arming’s shop.”

Her head rose then, and at last their eyes met. He saw that she was offended; again he had that unaccountable sensation of being lanced, of falling short, of failing her. But this time it brought him to his senses, that is, to the attitude he had decided to adopt; for this meeting took place two days after the events of the last chapters. Dr. Grogan’s little remark about the comparative priority to be accorded the dead and the living had germinated, and Charles now saw a scientific as well as a humanitarian reason in his adventure. He had been frank enough to admit to himself that it contained, besides the impropriety, an element of pleasure; but now he detected a clear element of duty. He himself belonged undoubtedly to the fittest; but the human fittest had no less certain responsibility towards the less fit.

He had even recontemplated revealing what had passed between himself and Miss Woodruff to Ernestina; but alas, he foresaw only too vividly that she might put foolish female questions, questions he could not truthfully answer without moving into dangerous waters. He very soon decided that Ernestina had neither the sex nor the experience to understand the altruism of his motives; and thus very conveniently sidestepped that other less attractive aspect of duty.

So he parried Sarah’s accusing look. “I am rich by chance, you are poor by chance. I think we are not to stand on such ceremony.”

This indeed was his plan: to be sympathetic to Sarah, but to establish a distance, to remind her of their difference of station… though lightly, of course, with an unpretentious irony.

“They are all I have to give.”

“There is no reason why you should give me anything.”

“You have come.”

He found her meekness almost as disconcerting as her pride.

“I have come because I have satisfied myself that you do indeed need help. And although I still don’t understand why you should have honored me by interesting me in your…” he faltered here, for he was about to say “case,” which would have betrayed that he was playing the doctor as well as the gentleman: “…Your predicament, I have come prepared to listen to what you wished me… did you not?… to hear.”

She looked up at him again then. He felt flattered. She gestured timidly towards the sunlight.

“I know a secluded place nearby. May we go there?”

He indicated willingness, and she moved out into the sun and across the stony clearing where Charles had been searching when she first came upon him. She walked lightly and surely, her skirt gathered up a few inches by one hand, while the other held the ribbons of her black bonnet. Following her, far less nimbly, Charles noted the darns in the heels of her black stockings, the worndown backs of her shoes; and also the red sheen in her dark hair. He guessed it was beautiful hair when fully loose; rich and luxuriant; and though it was drawn tightly back inside the collar of her coat, he wondered whether it was not a vanity that made her so often carry her bonnet in her hand.