“The recreations of the place were as interesting as its labors. The social life was that of a highly selected college community, where everybody knows everybody else and his wife, and finds them well worth knowing; and everywhere, always, there rose and fell a tide of excellent talk.
“In short, I had so good a time that I visited Portia not three days, but ten, and then departed with a regret that was not dispelled even when she formally approved my conduct by inviting me to come again. She was so smiling and sympathetic at the pier that I found myself asking a question that had repeatedly suggested itself, but which had as often been spontaneously repressed.
“What, if any, was the definite or practical value of her summer’s work, as compared with that which she had previously been doing in the field of domestic science? That, she replied, was for me to determine. Perhaps, when I thought it all over, some such bearing would occur to me. I was afraid that she was going to be disappointed in me, after all, and hastened to change the subject by inquiring why, since the afternoon was so fine, she was wearing her long oilskin coat and sou’wester hat. It was certainly a becoming costume, although it too much concealed her trim figure—her color was now all that could be desired.
“‘Oh, I don’t work in the laboratory all of the time,’ she answered. ‘I—that is, we—are going sailing.’ Just at that moment the importunate mate’s ‘All aboard’ precluded further leave-taking. But as I watched her from the deck of the receding steamer, after a farewell wave of the hand, turn expectantly toward a jaunty sail-boat that was skimming in the direction of the pier under the guidance of one of the younger professors, I began to have glimmerings of at least one answer to my question.”
XVIII
Measuring the Mind
WHEN Professor Maturin discovered that his young friend Portia had become a student of psychology, he expressed no surprise, having learned where she was concerned to expect the unexpected. But he did voice his impression that the science was one that had, as yet, but an imperfect appreciation of the feminine mind. “Precisely,” replied Portia; “listen to this,” and opening one of her note-books, she read: “Our modern knowledge of woman represents her as primitive, conservative, nearer the savage than man. She is lighter, weaker, slower, less dexterous, less accurate, less individual. She is more nervous, more emotional, more superstitious, and more often insane. In short, her lack of accomplishment is due not to subjection, but to fundamental inferiority.”
“Now that,” concluded Portia, “was undoubtedly written by a man, and is therefore probably as mistaken as what men have usually written about women in novels and poems. At any rate, I intend to see for myself.” Professor Maturin immediately commended her intention, and subsequently followed her progress with an interest which, after a time, she rewarded by an invitation to visit the laboratory where she was working. It was not long, by the way, before she discovered that, although the particular statements of the German scientist she had quoted were in the main correct, an obsession of the Kaiser’s “church, children, cooking, and clothes” doctrine had made him ignore equally striking facts on the other side. Her other discoveries shall be given in Professor Maturin’s own words. “As we started on our expedition she read me a counter quotation, from an even more famous authority: ‘Woman is more observant, more assimilative, more sympathetic, more intuitional, more aesthetic, and more moral than man. She is more typical of the race and nearer the superman of the future. Man in comparison is senile, if not decadent.’
“My burst of admiration for a science that could solve the same problem in such opposite ways, was checked by Portia’s remarking that she attributed scarcely more importance to the latter than to the former statement. She was quite in accord with the directors of her laboratory, in considering much of what calls itself psychology to be based on philosophic deduction or popular generalization, rather than on scientific observation and experiment. As a matter of fact, scientific psychology, as a development of the present generation, was just beginning to find its accumulated facts sufficient for any generalization. This statement gave me a sense of entering a theatre just as the curtain was going up.
“After a glimpse at the general arrangement of the department’s score or more of rooms, Portia proceeded to lead me systematically through the suite devoted to physiological psychology. Concerning the sense of smell, little seemed to be known, except that it is sufficiently sensitive to detect a thimbleful of odorous gas diffused through a very large room. Not much more is known concerning taste, except that it can be stimulated electrically, as smell cannot be, and that sweet and sour are distinguished chiefly by the tip of the tongue; bitter and salt by the back.
“But discoveries in physics have made possible extensive studies of sound sensation. The average ear has a compass for sounds of from twenty-eight vibrations a second to twenty-two thousand, and can detect differences caused by a variation of sixty. The figures for sight are even more surprising. The sensation of red is caused by rays of light which vibrate from four hundred and forty to four hundred and seventy billion times a second. At this stage of my observations, I abandoned my memory for a pencil and note-book. Increasingly rapid vibrations produce the other colors, up to violet, which is caused by about seven hundred and twenty-two billions.