"My dear fellow," Bernard said, "you must really excuse me; I
cannot take these subterranean excursions. I should lose my breath down
there; I should never come up alive. You know I have dropped things
down--little jokes and metaphors, little fantasies and paradoxes--and I
have never heard them touch bottom!" This was an epigram on the part
of a young man who had a lively play of fancy; but it was none the less
true that Gordon Wright had a firmly-treading, rather than a winged,
intellect. Every phrase in his letter seemed, to Bernard, to march
in stout-soled walking-boots, and nothing could better express his
attachment to the process of reasoning things out than this proposal
that his friend should come and make a chemical analysis--a geometrical
survey--of the lady of his love. "That I shall have any difficulty in
forming an opinion, and any difficulty in expressing it when formed--of
this he has as little idea as that he shall have any difficulty in
accepting it when expressed." So Bernard reflected, as he rolled in the
train to Munich. "Gordon's mind," he went on, "has no atmosphere; his
intellectual process goes on in the void. There are no currents and
eddies to affect it, no high winds nor hot suns, no changes of season
and temperature.
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