Burned Bridges

In the end, lacking profitable employment and growing dubious of

obtaining it during the slack industrial season which then hovered over

California, he turned to the serried shelves of the city library. Once

started along this road he became an habitué, spending in a particular

chair at a certain table anywhere from three to six hours a day, deep in

a book, not to be deterred therefrom by the usual series of mental

shocks which a man, full-fed all his life on conventions and dogmas and

superficial thinking, gets when he first goes seriously and critically

into the fields of scientific conclusions.

He was seated at a reading table one afternoon, nursing his chin in one

hand, deep in a volume of Huxley's "Lectures and Essays" which was

making a profound impression upon him through its twin merits of simple,

concise language and breadth of vision. There was in it a rational

explanation of certain elementary processes which to Thompson had never

been accounted for save by means of the supernatural, the mysterious,

the inexplicable. Huxley was merely sharpening a function of his mind

which had been dormant until he ran amuck among the books. He began to

perceive order in the universe and all that it contained, that natural

phenomena could be interpreted by a study of nature, that there was

something more than a name in geology. And he was so immersed in what

he read, in the printed page and the inevitable speculations that arose

in his mind as he conned it, that he was only subconsciously aware of a

woman passing his seat.

Slowly, as a man roused from deep sleep looks about him for the cause of

dimly heard noises, so now Thompson's eyes lifted from his book, and,

with his mind still half upon the last sentence read, his gaze followed

the girl now some forty feet distant in the long, quiet room.

There was no valid reason why the rustle of a woman's skirt in passing,

the faint suggestion of some delicate perfume, should have focussed his

attention. He saw scores of women and girls in the library every day. He

passed thousands on the streets. This one, now, upon whom he gazed with

a detached interest, was like many others, a girl of medium height,

slender, well-dressed.

That was all--until she paused at a desk to have speech with a library

assistant. She turned then so that her face was in profile, so that a

gleam of hair showed under a wide leghorn hat. And Thompson thought

there could scarcely be two women in the world with quite so marvellous

a similarity of face and figure and coloring, nor with quite the same

contour of chin and cheek, nor the same thick hair, yellow like the

husks of ripe corn or a willow leaf in the autumn. He was just as sure

that by some strange chance Sophie Carr stood at that desk as he was

sure of himself sitting in an oak chair at a reading table. And he rose

impulsively to go to her.