On a certain Sunday he sat beside his wife in church, singing snatches of the hymns in a doleful and untrue voice and meditating, during the long sermon, on the structure of chromosomes. She, bolt upright and overshadowing him, like a coffin in the pew, rigid lest her black silk rustle, thrilled in some corner of her mind at the picture of hell and salvation.
Mr. Danner's thoughts turned to Professor Mudge, whose barren pate showed above the congregation a few rows ahead of him. There, he said to himself, sat a stubborn and unenlightened man. And so, when the weekly tyranny of church was ended, he asked Mudge to dinner. That he accomplished by an argument with his wife, audible the length of the aisle.
They walked to the Danner residence. Mrs. Danner changed her clothes hurriedly, basted the roast, made milk sauce for the string beans, and set three places. They went into the dining-room. Danner carved, the home-made mint jelly was passed, the bread, the butter, the gravy; and Mrs. Danner dropped out of the conversation, after guying her husband on his lack of skill at his task of carving.
Mudge opened with the usual comment. "Well, Abednego, how are the blood-stream radicals progressing?"
His host chuckled. "Excellently, thanks. Some day I'll be ready to jolt you hidebound biologists into your senses."
Mudge's left eyebrow lifted. "So? Still the same thing, I take it? Still believe that chemistry controls human destiny?"
"Almost ready to demonstrate it," Danner replied.
"Along what lines?"
"Muscular strength and the nervous discharge of energy."
Mudge slapped his thigh. "Ho ho! Nervous discharge of energy. You assume the human body to be a voltaic pile, eh? That's good. I'll have to tell Gropper. He'll enjoy it."