"It isn't the skeleton I'm interested in," grunted Haynes. "It's what is outside the skeleton that my Lensman will be looking at."
"You needn't worry about MacDougall," declared the surgeon. "One good look at that picture will tell you that. She classifies. With that skeleton she has to. She couldn't leave the beam a millimeter, even if she wanted to. Good, bad, or indifferent; male or female; physical, mental, moral, and psychological; the skeleton tells the whole story."
"Maybe it does to you, but not to me." And Haynes took up the "conventional" photograph—a stereoscope in full and absolutely true color, an almost living duplicate of the girl in question. Her thick, heavy hair was not red, but was a vividly intense and indescribable auburn, a gorgeous mass of coppery bronze, flashed with red and gold. Her eyes—bronze was all that he could think of, with flecks of topaz and of tawny gold. Her skin, too, was faintly bronze, glowing with even more than healthy youth's normal measure of sparkling vitality. Not only was she beautiful, the port admiral decided; in the words of the surgeon, she "classified."
"Hm-m-m. Worse even than I thought," he muttered. "She's a menace to civilization." And he went on to read the documents. "Family—hm-m-m. History.... Experiences.... Reactions and characteristics ... behavior ... psychology ... mentality——"
"She'll do, Lacy," he advised the surgeon finally. "Keep her on with him."
"But see here, Haynes, you suspicious old granny!" snorted the doctor. "He won't be falling for anybody yet. Why, he's just been unattached. He'll be bulletproof for quite a while. You ought to know that young Lensmen—especially young gray Lensmen—can't see anything but their jobs, for a couple of years, anyway."
"His skeleton tells you that, too, huh?" Haynes grunted, skeptically. "Ordinarily, yes! but you never can tell, especially in hospitals."
"More of your layman's misinformation!" Lacy snapped. "Contrary to popular belief, romance does not thrive in hospitals; except, of course, among the staff. Patients oftentimes think that they fall in love with nurses, but it takes two people to make one romance. Nurses do not fall in love with patients, because a man is never at his best under hospitalization. In fact, the better a man is, the poorer a showing he is apt to make."
"And, as I forget who said, a long time ago, 'no generalization is ever true, not even this one,'" retorted the port admiral. "When it does hit him it will hit hard, and we'll take no chances. How about the black-haired one?"
"Well, I just told you that MacDougall has the only perfect skeleton I ever saw in a woman. Brownlee is very good, too, of course, but——"