She had her sacred books, written by false priests and sold by millions to the faithful.  In the most successful of these works, ancient dogma and modern discovery were depicted in a close embrace under the lime-lights of a hazy transcendentalism; and the tableau never failed of its effect.  Some of the books designed on this popular model had lately fallen into the Professor’s hands, and they filled him with mingled rage and hilarity.  The rage soon died:  he came to regard this mass of pseudo-literature as protecting the truth from desecration.  But the hilarity remained, and flowed into the form of his idea.  And the idea—­the divine, incomparable idea—­was simply that he should avenge his goddess by satirizing her false interpreters.  He would write a skit on the “popular” scientific book; he would so heap platitude on platitude, fallacy on fallacy, false analogy on false analogy, so use his superior knowledge to abound in the sense of the ignorant, that even the gross crowd would join in the laugh against its augurs.  And the laugh should be something more than the distension of mental muscles; it should be the trumpet-blast bringing down the walls of ignorance, or at least the little stone striking the giant between the eyes.

II

The Professor, on presenting his card, had imagined that it would command prompt access to the publisher’s sanctuary; but the young man who read his name was not moved to immediate action.  It was clear that Professor Linyard of Hillbridge University was not a specific figure to the purveyors of popular literature.  But the publisher was an old friend; and when the card had finally drifted to his office on the languid tide of routine he came forth at once to greet his visitor.

The warmth of his welcome convinced the Professor that he had been right in bringing his manuscript to Ned Harviss.  He and Harviss had been at Hillbridge together, and the future publisher had been one of the wildest spirits in that band of college outlaws which yearly turns out so many inoffensive citizens and kind husbands and fathers.  The Professor knew the taming qualities of life.  He was aware that many of his most reckless comrades had been transformed into prudent capitalists or cowed wage-earners; but he was almost sure that he could count on Harviss.  So rare a sense of irony, so keen a perception of relative values, could hardly have been blunted even by twenty years’ intercourse with the obvious.

The publisher’s appearance was a little disconcerting.  He looked as if he had been fattened on popular fiction; and his fat was full of optimistic creases.  The Professor seemed to see him bowing into his office a long train of spotless heroines laden with the maiden tribute of the hundredth thousand volume.

Nevertheless, his welcome was reassuring.  He did not disown his early enormities, and capped his visitor’s tentative allusions by such flagrant references to the past that the Professor produced his manuscript without a scruple.