Low stopped and gazed at her with such frank, open, utterly unabashed curiosity that her black eyes fell before him.
"And do you think," he asked with logical deliberation, "that you could find any plant from another I should give you ?" "Yes." "Or from a drawing of it ?" "Yes; perhaps even if you described it to me." A half-confidential, half fraternal silence followed.
"I tell you what.

I've got a book"-- "I know it," interrupted Teresa; "full of these things." "Yes.

Do you think you could"-- "Of course I could," broke in Teresa, again.
"But you don't know what I mean," said the imperturbable Low.
"Certainly I do.

Why, find 'em, and preserve all the different ones for you to write under--that's it, isn't it ?" Low nodded his head, gratified but not entirely convinced that she had fully estimated the magnitude of the endeavor.
"I suppose," said Teresa, in the feminine postscriptum voice which it would seem entered even the philosophical calm of the aisles they were treading--"I suppose that _she_ places great value on them ?" Low had indeed heard Science personified before, nor was it at all impossible that the singular woman walking by his side had also.

He said "Yes;" but added, in mental reference to the Linnean Society of San Francisco, that "_they_ were rather particular about the rarer kinds." Content as Teresa had been to believe in Low's tender relations with some favored _one_ of her sex, this frank confession of a plural devotion staggered her.
"They ?" she repeated.
"Yes," he continued calmly.