It was pleasanter in the conservatory—­a low, spacious structure with broad pathways between the plants, and an awning over the sunny side of the roof.  The plants were mostly orchids, he learned.  He had read of them, but never seen any before.  No doubt they were curious; but he discovered nothing to justify the great fuss made about them.  The heat grew oppressive inside, and he was glad to emerge into the garden.  He paused under the grateful shade of a vine-clad trellis, took off his hat, and looked about him with a sigh of relief.  Everything seemed old-fashioned and natural and delightfully free from pretence in the big, overgrown field of flowers and shrubs.

Theron recalled with some surprise Celia’s indictment of the doctor as a man with no poetry in his soul.  “You must be extremely fond of flowers,” he remarked.

Dr. Ledsmar shrugged his well shoulder.  “They have their points,” he said briefly.  “These are all dioecious here.  Over beyond are monoecious species.  My work is to test the probabilities for or against Darwin’s theory that hermaphroditism in plants is a late by-product of these earlier forms.”

“And is his theory right?” asked Mr. Ware, with a polite show of interest.

“We may know in the course of three or four hundred years,” replied Ledsmar.  He looked up into his guest’s face with a quizzical half-smile.  “That is a very brief period for observation when such a complicated question as sex is involved,” he added.  “We have been studying the female of our own species for some hundreds of thousands of years, and we haven’t arrived at the most elementary rules governing her actions.”

They had moved along to a bed of tall plants, the more forward of which were beginning to show bloom.  “Here another task will begin next month,” the doctor observed.  “These are salvias, pentstemons, and antirrhinums, or snapdragons, planted very thick for the purpose.  Humble-bees bore holes through their base, to save the labor of climbing in and out of the flowers, and we don’t quite know yet why some hive-bees discover and utilize these holes at once, while others never do.  It may be merely the old-fogy conservatism of the individual, or there may be a law in it.”

These seemed very paltry things for a man of such wisdom to bother his head about.  Theron looked, as he was bidden, at the rows of hives shining in the hot sun on a bench along the wall, but offered no comment beyond a casual, “My mother was always going to keep bees, but somehow she never got around to it.  They say it pays very well, though.”

“The discovery of the reason why no bee will touch the nectar of the EPIPACTIS LATIFOLIA, though it is sweet to our taste, and wasps are greedy for it, would pay,” commented the doctor.  “Not like a blue rhododendron, in mere money, but in recognition.  Lots of men have achieved a half-column in the ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’ on a smaller basis than that.”