I admired our famous Professor, and I admired Hilda Wade:  ’twas a matter of regret to me that my two admirations did not seem in return sufficiently to admire one another.  “Oh, yes,” Hilda answered, pouring out my second cup; “he is a very great man.  I never denied that.  The greatest man, on the whole, I think, that I have ever come across.”

“And he has done splendid work for humanity,” I went on, growing enthusiastic.

“Splendid work!  Yes, splendid! (Two lumps, I believe?) He has done more, I admit, for medical science than any other man I ever met.”

I gazed at her with a curious glance.  “Then why, dear lady, do you keep telling me he is cruel?” I inquired, toasting my feet on the fender.  “It seems contradictory.”

She passed me the muffins, and smiled her restrained smile.

“Does the desire to do good to humanity in itself imply a benevolent disposition?” she answered, obliquely.

“Now you are talking in paradox.  Surely, if a man works all his life long for the good of mankind, that shows he is devoured by sympathy for his species.”

“And when your friend Mr. Bates works all his life long at observing, and classifying lady-birds, I suppose that shows he is devoured by sympathy for the race of beetles!”

I laughed at her comical face, she looked at me so quizzically.  “But then,” I objected, “the cases are not parallel.  Bates kills and collects his lady-birds; Sebastian cures and benefits humanity.”

Hilda smiled her wise smile once more, and fingered her apron.  “Are the cases so different as you suppose?” she went on, with her quick glance.  “Is it not partly accident?  A man of science, you see, early in life, takes up, half by chance, this, that, or the other particular form of study.  But what the study is in itself, I fancy, does not greatly matter; do not mere circumstances as often as not determine it?  Surely it is the temperament, on the whole, that tells:  the temperament that is or is not scientific.”

“How do you mean?  You are so enigmatic!”

“Well, in a family of the scientific temperament, it seems to me, one brother may happen to go in for butterflies—­may he not?—­and another for geology, or for submarine telegraphs.  Now, the man who happens to take up butterflies does not make a fortune out of his hobby—­there is no money in butterflies; so we say, accordingly, he is an unpractical person, who cares nothing for business, and who is only happy when he is out in the fields with a net, chasing emperors and tortoise-shells.  But the man who happens to fancy submarine telegraphy most likely invents a lot of new improvements, takes out dozens of patents, finds money flow in upon him as he sits in his study, and becomes at last a peer and a millionaire; so then we say, What a splendid business head he has got, to be sure, and how immensely he differs from his poor wool-gathering brother, the entomologist, who can only invent new ways of hatching out wire-worms!  Yet all may really depend on the first chance direction which led one brother as a boy to buy a butterfly net, and sent the other into the school laboratory to dabble with an electric wheel and a cheap battery.”