CHAPTER II
A MAN OF SCIENCE
Professor Lawless was a scientist, and, as is common among professors and scientists, very eccentric. A Bachelor of Medicine, he had practised as much or as little as pleased him, and devoted most of his time to the materialisation of experiments that, if perfected, would make his fortune.
Not that it was with this end in view that he laboured, for his means were considerable, and it was his custom to give his services and advice to patients gratis in the majority of cases, although his sister Gay was no advocate of this practice.
"Why don't you put up a notice with "Free Hospital" on it over the door, and have done with the farce of refusing to take fees from people who can well afford them?" she used to ask indignantly. "You forget that it cost a heap of money during the five years you were learning the little you now know"—she laughed, for he was really a walking encyclopædia of learning—"and do you intend to get none of it back?"
Her brother would beam at her through the glasses that were eternally slipping off his nose.
"You are too commercial, Gay," he said. "None of us are infallible, and it would pain me to think that I had taken money for what might, after all, have been a mistaken diagnosis. I have ample means for my wants—which are simple—and I disapprove strongly of the tactics employed by some medical men in accepting fees for ailments which are often imaginary, and more often curable by fresh air and exercise than drugs and knives."
"Oh, you're hopeless," Gay rejoined, and there the argument ended for the time being, much to the Professor's satisfaction.
A remarkably handsome and intellectual-looking man, tall, but with a slight stoop, and with far-away, clear blue eyes that narrowed habitually whenever he looked at anything, possibly through years of close microscopic work, Frank Lawless had a personality (if an untidy one, as Gay said) that compelled people to ask, "Who is that man?"
He seldom left his laboratory and books, though occasionally Gay prevailed upon him to accompany her to some function or other, when he donned a dress-suit of archaic pattern, and, after spoiling a dozen ties, and wandering miserably in and out of his sister's room to ask if "this will do?" waited patiently in the hall, with an obsolete opera-hat held gingerly in one hand, the while he read from a scientific treatise held close to his eyes in the other.