At the spring examinations Lorna Freeman gained top place, defeating Mauney by many marks and winning the Hennigar scholarship for proficiency in history. He congratulated her cordially, and inwardly admitted her superior ability. She deserved the distinction. He was not jealous, for even at the end of his first year his eye was looking at something different from marks and scholarships. He had passed his exams—that was all he cared. There were other rewards—quiet, inner compensations, from the reading of history. These he had not missed. The story of humanity was growing real to him, something he could touch with his hands and cherish. There came thoughts that pleased his fancy, and he wrote them in a big, empty ledger—wonderful thoughts about history, that he wanted no one but himself to read. He prized his ledger. Many a night during the long summer vacation he took it from the locked drawer of his desk and added more paragraphs to it. It was nothing—just his fancies.
Maxwell Lee, having successfully graduated, and having acquired the degree of M.D., gained an appointment in the department of biochemistry, as a research fellow, at a salary of seven hundred dollars a year, and began work immediately. Mauney was introduced to his laboratory, a big upstairs room in the Medical Building, with two bald, great windows that flooded the place with a brilliant light. It was a busy room, filled with long tables of intricate apparatus, retorts, gas burners, and complicated arrangements of glass tubes, resembling a child’s conception of a factory. He often dropped in to talk with Lee, who was always absorbed in his new work, bent over steaming dishes of fluid, or seated before a delicate scales, contained in a glass case. He spoke seldom of Freda MacDowell, now, but much of a certain disease upon which he was working, in an attempt to discover its cause. Mauney disliked the laboratory, pungent with fumes of acid, but was glad to see Max so happy in his work.
Lee still remained at Mrs. Manton’s boarding-house and in the evenings, when he was not busy at the Medical Building, was to be found, sitting in his shirt sleeves, in an alcove of the upstairs hallway, reading technical treatises on biochemistry.
Fred Stalton gradually formed his own original opinion about the intense occupation of Lee.
“Since he got that M.D. tacked on to his name,” Stalton remarked to Mauney one night in the dining-room, “he’s sort of waded out into biochemistry a little too deep. Max has changed, Mauney. He’s changed a lot. When he first came here to stay, he was the life of the party, a real midnight serenader, believe me. Of course, I suppose somebody’s got to do the tall studying, but I hate to see him so much at it. His health won’t stand it. He’s not very strong. He ought to rig up an office down on College Street, hang out his shingle and practise. Why, if he just had the lucre I’ve spent on doctors he could take a holiday in Honolulu. People would be bound to come to him. Doctors don’t do any good except to ease your mind a little, and that’s why people go to them. You get a pain in your almanack, and you hike right over to the nearest medico. He just lays on the hands, tells you it’s a very minor trouble; you pay him a couple of bones for a piece of paper and go home tickled all over. It’s a game, but Max ought to play it. He’s getting too serious.”
“Maybe,” admitted Mauney. “But he’s all taken up with the idea of striking the cause of pernicious anæmia—”
“Anæmia?”
“Yes.”
“What’s that like?”
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you. Max did describe it to me. People with it are sort of pale and yellow and lose their pep.”