In his search for a bride, Dr. Crafts, who had founded a sort of Eugenics Bureau, had come to advise him. Others may have looked up their brides in Bradstreet’s, or at least the Social Register. Atherton had gone higher, had been overjoyed to find that a girl he had met in the West, Eugenia Gilman, measured up to what his friend told him were the latest teachings of science. He had been overjoyed because, long before Crafts had told him, he had found out that he loved her deeply.
“And now,” he went on, half choking with emotion, “she is apparently suffering from just the same sort of depression as I myself might suffer from if the recessive trait became active.”
“What do you mean, for instance?” asked Craig.
“Well, for one thing, she has the delusion that my relatives are persecuting her.”
“Persecuting her?” repeated Craig, stifling the remark that that was not in itself a new thing in this or any other family. “How?”
“Oh, making her feel that, after all, it is Atherton family rather than Gilman health that counts—little remarks that when our baby is born, they hope it will resemble Quincy rather than Eugenia, and all that sort of thing, only worse and more cutting, until the thing has begun to prey on her mind.”
“I see,” remarked Kennedy thoughtfully. “But don’t you think this is a case for a—a doctor, rather than a detective?”
Atherton glanced up quickly. “Kennedy,” he answered slowly, “where millions of dollars are involved, no one can guess to what lengths the human mind will go—no one, except you.”
“Then you have suspicions of something worse?”
“Y-yes—but nothing definite. Now, take this case. If I should die childless, after my wife, the Atherton estate would descend to my nearest relative, Burroughs Atherton, a cousin.”