“No,” moped little Eve Edgarton.

“Nor any end?” he insisted.  “Nor any middle?”

“N—­o,” sighed little Eve Edgarton.

Helplessly Barton plunged into the unhappy task before him.  On page nine there were perhaps the fewest blots.  He decided to begin there.

     “Paleontologically,”

the first sentence smote him—­

     “Paleontologically the periods are characterized by absence of
     the large marine saurians, Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs—­”

“eh?” gasped Barton.

“Why, of course!” called Edgarton, a bit impatiently, from the window.

Laboriously Barton went back and reread the phrase to himself.  “Oh—­oh, yes,” he conceded lamely.

     “Paleontologically,”

he began all over again.  “Oh, dear, no!” he interrupted himself.  “I was farther along than that!—­Absence of marine saurians?  Oh, yes!

     “Absence of marine saurians,”

he resumed glibly,

     “Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs—­so abundant in the—­in the
     Cretaceous—­of Ammonites and Belemnites,”

he persisted—­heroically.  Hesitatingly, stumblingly, without a glimmer of understanding, his bewildered mind worried on and on, its entire mental energy concentrated on the single purpose of trying to pronounce the awful words.

     “Of Rudistes, Inocerami—­Tri—­Trigonias,”

the horrible paragraph tortured on ...

     “By the marked reduction in the—­Brachiopods compared
     with the now richly developed Gasteropods and—­and
     sinupalliate—­Lamellibranchs,”—­

it writhed and twisted before his dizzy eyes.

Every sentence was a struggle; more than one of the words he was forced to spell aloud just out of sheer self-defense; and always against Eve Edgarton’s little intermittent nod of encouragement was balanced that hateful sniffing sound of surprise and contempt from the orchid table in the window.

Despairingly he skipped a few lines to the next unfamiliar words that met his eye.

     “The Neozoic flora,”

he read,

     “consists mainly of—­of Angio—­Angiosper—­”

Still smiling, but distinctly wan around the edges of the smile, he slammed the handful of papers down on his knee.  “If it really doesn’t make any difference where we begin, Miss Eve,” he said, “for Heaven’s sake—­let’s begin somewhere else!”

“Oh—­all right,” crooned little Eve Edgarton.

Expeditiously Barton turned to another page, and another, and another.  Wryly he tasted strange sentence after strange sentence.  Then suddenly his whole wonderful face wreathed itself in smiles again.

     “Three superfamilies of turtles,”

he began joyously.  “Turtles!  Ha!—­I know turtles!” he proceeded with real triumph.  “Why, that’s the first word I’ve recognized in all this—­this—­er—­this what I’ve been reading!  Sure I know turtles!” he reiterated with increasing conviction.  “Why, sure!  Those—­those slow-crawling, box-like affairs that—­live in the mud and are used for soup and—­er—­combs,” he continued blithely.