“Oh, Marcella, your ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ are so funny, if you only knew it!  You might as well say, ‘Is fire wrong?’ It’s there.  There’s no getting away from it.  When I was a wee laddie at home I had to write copy-book lessons on Saturday afternoons to keep me out of mischief.  One I wrote so often that it keeps coming into my mind in the most foolish way often.  ‘Fire is a good servant but a bad master.’  That was the sentence.  The times I’ve written it, thick down strokes, thin upstrokes!  Well, that’s like any of these ologies—­biology especially.  It’s a good teacher.  You don’t have to let it be a taskmaster.”

“I’d like to learn ologies, doctor.  I’d like to learn to the roots of things.  All the things I know—­legends, history, poetry, haven’t any roots at all.  Professor Kraill’s a biologist, isn’t he?”

“Well, yes—­rather a heterodox one, but he’s getting believed now.  But how on earth did you know?” he said, turning on her in surprise.

“There was an advertisement of a book of his lectures.  It was called ‘Questing Cells’ and father got it.  I had to read it to him—­with a dictionary at almost every line, because I didn’t understand it.  It showed me that, though I am muddled now, there is such a thing as clearness in the world.  It seemed to me that if I knew all the things Professor Kraill knows things might be like a crystal ball—­all the things in the world, you know, beautifully clear and rounded off.  I read a lot of books to father after that and got muddled again.  But I never lost the feel of Professor Kraill’s book.  I couldn’t tell you a word of it now, but it’s like the memory of a most beautiful music.  I love him.  I’d love to hear him—­to see him.  He’s the wisest man in the world.”

“Heaven forbid!” said the doctor, laughing a little.

“Why?  Don’t you admire him?”

“Immensely, though he’s heterodox.  But he’s just what I was saying to you just now—­an example of a man who isn’t the Trinity.  Being a biologist, he’s run all to body and brain.  He’s let his spirit get famished a bit.  Queer things—­one hears, too—­inevitable things.”

“How do you mean?” she cried, quick to defend her hero, but eager with curiosity about him.

“Oh, things you wouldn’t understand.  He’s given up his chair at the University.”

There was a long silence.  Then Marcella said definitely: 

“Anyway, he’s splendid.  I love him.”  The doctor laughed and told her it was a good thing she wasn’t a student if she fell in love with professors from their lectures.

“Well, go on with what you were saying,” she said imperiously, and the doctor began to think that he had not quite reckoned with Marcella’s passion for getting to the roots of things.  But he expounded his theory to her, telling her that before many years things that were miracles in the time of Christ would be scientific bagatelles in the hospitals.

“We’ve been having a materialistic time, Marcella, ever since Huxley and Darwin.  Now we’re coming to the swing of the pendulum.  The body and its appetites have got very strong.  Soon we’ll have them beat by the mind.”