"I suppose you take him for granted?" said her aunt.

"He's like this," said Rachel, lighting on a fossilised fish in a basin,
and displaying it.

"I expect you're too severe," Helen remarked.

Rachel immediately tried to qualify what she had said against her
belief.

"I don't really know him," she said, and took refuge in facts, believing
that elderly people really like them better than feelings. She produced
what she knew of William Pepper. She told Helen that he always called on
Sundays when they were at home; he knew about a great many things--about
mathematics, history, Greek, zoology, economics, and the Icelandic
Sagas. He had turned Persian poetry into English prose, and English
prose into Greek iambics; he was an authority upon coins; and--one other
thing--oh yes, she thought it was vehicular traffic.

He was here either to get things out of the sea, or to write upon the
probable course of Odysseus, for Greek after all was his hobby.

"I've got all his pamphlets," she said. "Little pamphlets. Little yellow
books." It did not appear that she had read them.

"Has he ever been in love?" asked Helen, who had chosen a seat.

This was unexpectedly to the point.

"His heart's a piece of old shoe leather," Rachel declared, dropping the