“Doesn’t it, by George!” cried MacIan, scornfully.  “There are a few men here who are mad on God and a few who are mad on the Bible.  But I bet there are many more who are simply mad on madness.”

“Do you really believe it?” asked the other.

“Scores of them, I should say,” answered MacIan.  “Fellows who have read medical books or fellows whose fathers and uncles had something hereditary in their heads—­the whole air they breathe is mad.”

“All the same,” said Turnbull, shrewdly, “I bet you haven’t found a madman of that sort.”

“I bet I have!” cried Evan, with unusual animation.  “I’ve been walking about the garden talking to a poor chap all the morning.  He’s simply been broken down and driven raving by your damned science.  Talk about believing one is God—­why, it’s quite an old, comfortable, fireside fancy compared with the sort of things this fellow believes.  He believes that there is a God, but that he is better than God.  He says God will be afraid to face him.  He says one is always progressing beyond the best.  He put his arm in mine and whispered in my ear, as if it were the apocalypse:  ’Never trust a God that you can’t improve on.’”

“What can he have meant?” said the atheist, with all his logic awake.  “Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on.”

“It is the way he talks,” said MacIan, almost indifferently; “but he says rummier things than that.  He says that a man’s doctor ought to decide what woman he marries; and he says that children ought not to be brought up by their parents, because a physical partiality will then distort the judgement of the educator.”

“Oh, dear!” said Turnbull, laughing, “you have certainly come across a pretty bad case, and incidentally proved your own.  I suppose some men do lose their wits through science as through love and other good things.”

“And he says,” went on MacIan, monotonously, “that he cannot see why anyone should suppose that a triangle is a three-sided figure.  He says that on some higher plane——­”

Turnbull leapt to his feet as by an electric shock.  “I never could have believed,” he cried, “that you had humour enough to tell a lie.  You’ve gone a bit too far, old man, with your little joke.  Even in a lunatic asylum there can’t be anybody who, having thought about the matter, thinks that a triangle has not got three sides.  If he exists he must be a new era in human psychology.  But he doesn’t exist.”

“I will go and fetch him,” said MacIan, calmly; “I left the poor fellow wandering about by the nasturtium bed.”

MacIan vanished, and in a few moments returned, trailing with him his own discovery among lunatics, who was a slender man with a fixed smile and an unfixed and rolling head.  He had a goatlike beard just long enough to be shaken in a strong wind.  Turnbull sprang to his feet and was like one who is speechless through choking a sudden shout of laughter.