"Madge didn't—hesitate at all—to tell me a thing or two to-night, did she?" Sagner began at last, gruffly.
I smiled. The relaxation made me feel as though my mouth had really got a chance at last to sit down.
"Am I so very old?" persisted Sagner. "I'm not forty-five."
I shrugged my shoulders.
Pettishly he reached out and clutched at a scalpel, cleansed it for an instant in the flame, and jabbed the point of it into his wrist. The red blood spurted instantly.
"There!" he cried out triumphantly. "I have blood in me! It isn't embalming fluid at all."
"Oh, quit your fooling, you old death-digger," I said. And then with overtense impulse I asked, "Sagner, man, do you really understand Life?"
Sagner's jaw-bones stiffened instantly. "Oh, yes," he exclaimed. "Oh, yes, of course I understand Life. That is," he added, with a most unusual burst of humility, "I understand everything, I think, except just why the gills of a fish—but, oh, bother, you wouldn't know what I meant; and there's a new French theory about odylic forces that puzzles me a little, and I never, never have been able to understand the particular mental processes of a woman who violates the law of species by naming her firstborn son for any man but his father. I'm not exactly criticising the fish," he added vehemently, "nor the new odylic theory, nor even the woman; I'm simply stating baldly and plainly the only three things under God's heaven that I can't quite seem to fathom."
"What's all this got to do with Mary Lennart?" I asked impatiently.
"Nothing at all to do with Mary Lennart," he answered proudly. "Mary Lennart's son is named Harold." He began to smoke very hard. "Considering the real object of our being put here in the world," he resumed didactically, "it has always seemed to me that the supreme test of character lay in the father's and mother's mental attitude toward their young."