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.