"Was that what gave you brain fever?"
"Yes."
"Well—tell me about it."
No good thing which has come to me since can compare with what the doctor did for me that night. For the first time in my life an adult talked with me seriously, let me talk. Grown-ups had talked to and at me without end. I had been told what I ought to believe. He was the first to ask me what I believed. It was perhaps the great love for him, which sprang up in my heart that night, which has made me in later life especially interested in such as he.
I began at the beginning, and when I got to "Salvation" Milton, he interrupted me.
"We're smashing rules so badly to-night, we might as well do more. I'm going to smoke. Want a cigar?"
I did not smoke in those days. But the offer of that cigar, his treating me like an adult and equal, gave me a new pride in life, gave me courage to go through with my story, to tell about Oliver and Mary, to tell him of my credo. He sat there smoking silently and heard me through.
"What do you think?" I asked at last, "Do you believe in God?"
"I don't know. I never happened to meet him in any laboratory. It sounds to me like a fairy story."
"Then you're an atheist," I said eagerly.