He could criticize her, and that gave him a heady sense of
power and freedom. He never forgot the year that she had deliberately
thrown away. And even now, when she stood at the beginning of the road
which he had already passed over, she seemed to him full of strange
curiosities and wayward, purposeless interests. There were days when
an ugly Chinese print, picked up in some back-street pawnshop, or the
misfortunes of one of her raffish hangers-on, or some wild student rag,
appeared to wipe out the vital business of life. She was known to be
brilliant, but he distrusted her power of leaping to conclusions over
the head of his own mathematical and exact reasoning. He distrusted
still more her tendency to be right in the teeth of every sort of
evidence to the contrary. It seemed that she took into her
calculations factors that no one else found, significant,
unprofessional straws in the wind, things she could not even explain.
And yet she understood when he talked about his work, and that alone
was like a gift to him. No one else understood--for that matter, no
one else had had to listen. He knew that Christine was too tired, and
poor overburdened Cosgrave would only have gazed helplessly at him,
wondering why this strong, self-sufficient friend should pour out such
unintelligible stuff over his own aching head. So he had learnt to be
silent. Even now it was difficult to begin. He stammered and was shy
and distrustful and eager, sometimes crudely self-confident, like a
child who has played alone too long.
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