Temple glanced round the room, and his eye rested for a moment on a round greyish-drab object that lay in the corner near the door. “The same fat books and folios, only more of them, the same smell of old bones, and a dissection—is it the same one?—in the window. Fame is your mistress?”
“Fame,” said Findlay. “But it’s hardly fame. The herd outside say, ‘Eminence in comparative anatomy.’”
“Eminence in comparative anatomy. No marrying—no avarice.”
“None,” said Findlay, glancing askance at him.
“I suppose it’s the happiest way of living. But it wouldn’t be the thing for me. Excitement—but, I say!”—his eye had fallen again on that fungoid shape of drabbish-grey—“there’s a limit to scientific inhumanity. You really mustn’t keep your door open with a human brainpan.”
He went across the room as he spoke and picked the thing up. “Brainpan!” said Findlay. “Oh, that! Man alive, that’s not a brainpan. Where’s your science?”
“No. I see it’s not,” said Temple, carrying the object in his hand as he came back to his former position and scrutinising it curiously. “But what the devil is it?”
“Don’t you know?” said Findlay.
The thing was about thrice the size of a man’s hand, like a rough watch-pocket of thick bone.
Findlay laughed almost naturally. “You have a bad memory—It’s a whale’s ear-bone.”