“You are quite right, Buck.”

“Yes—­but how’re you goin’ to do it?  You sit up here all day and night with your books and studies, Doc—­where’s your cure for a sorry trouble like this?”

“That is a fair question.  I cannot answer definitely until I have studied the situation out in a practical way.  But I will say that the general problem is one of the most difficult with which social science has to deal.”

“I know what had ought to be done.  The blaggards ought to be shot.  Damn every last one of them, I say.”

Klinker conversed in his anger something like the ladies of Billingsgate, but Queed did not notice this.  He sat back in his chair, absorbedly thinking that here, at all events, was a theme which had enough practical relation with life.  He himself had seen a group of the odious “mashers” with his own eyes; Buck had pointed them out as they walked up.  Never had a social problem come so close home to him as this:  not a thing of text-book theories, but a burning issue working out around the corner on people that Klinker knew.  And Klinker’s question had been an acute one, challenging the immediate value of social science itself.

His thought veered, swept out of its channel by an unwonted wave of bitterness.  Klinker had offered him this material, Klinker had advised him to write an editorial about it, Klinker had pointed out for him, in almost a superior way, just where the trouble lay.  Nor was this all.  Of late everybody seemed to be giving him advice.  Only the other week it was Fifi; and that same day, the young lady Charles Weyland.  What was there about him that invited this sort of thing?...  And he was going to take Klinker’s advice; he had seized upon it gratefully.  Nor could he say that he was utterly insensate to Fifi’s:  he had caught himself saying over part of it not ten minutes ago.  As for Charles Weyland’s ripsaw criticisms, he had analyzed them dispassionately, as he had promised, and his reason rejected them in toto.  Yet he could not exactly say that he had wholly purged them out of his mind.  No ... the fact was that some of her phrases had managed to burn themselves into his brain.

Presently Klinker said another thing that his friend the little Doctor remembered for a long time.

“Do you know what’s the finest line in Scripture, Doc? But He spake of the temple of His body. I heard a minister get that off in a church once, in a sermon, and I don’t guess I’ll ever forget it.  A dandy, ain’t it?...  Exercise and live straight.  Keep your temple strong and clean.  If I was a parson, I tell you, I’d go right to Seventh and Centre next Saturday and give a talk to them blaggards on that. But He spake of ...”

Klinker stopped as though he had been shot.  A sudden agonized scream from downstairs jerked him off the bed and to his feet in a second solemn as at the last trump.  He stared at Queed wide-eyed, his honest red face suddenly white.