“Oh. Well. Well, I would like to keep up some research. But thunder, I’m not just a lab-cat. Battle o’ life. Smashing your way through. Competing with real men in real he-struggle. If I can’t do that and do some scientific work too, I’m no good. Course while I’m with Gottlieb, I want to take advantage of it, but afterward— Oh, Madeline!”
Then was all reasoning lost in a blur of nearness to her.
VI
He dreaded the interview with Mrs. Fox; he was certain that she would demand, “Young man, how do you expect to support my Maddy? And you use bad language.” But she took his hand and mourned, “I hope you and my baby will be happy. She’s a dear good girl, even if she is a little flighty sometimes, and I know you’re nice and kind and hard-working. I shall pray you’ll be happy—oh, I’ll pray so hard! You young people don’t seem to think much of prayer, but if you knew how it helped me— Oh, I’ll petition for your sweet happiness!”
She was weeping; she kissed Martin’s forehead with the dry, soft, gentle kiss of an old woman, and he was near to weeping with her.
At parting Madeline whispered, “Boy, I don’t care a bit, myself, but Mother would love it if we went to church with her. Don’t you think you could, just once?”
The astounded world, the astounded and profane Clif Clawson, had the spectacle of Martin in shiny pressed clothes, a painful linen collar, and an arduously tied scarf, accompanying Mrs. Fox and the chastely chattering Madeline to the Mohalis Methodist Church, to hear the Reverend Dr. Myron Schwab discourse on “The One Way to Righteousness.”
They passed the Reverend Ira Hinkley, and Ira gloated with a holy gloating at Martin’s captivity.
VII
For all his devotion to Max Gottlieb’s pessimistic view of the human intellect, Martin had believed that there was such a thing as progress, that events meant something, that people could learn something, that if Madeline had once admitted she was an ordinary young woman who occasionally failed, then she was saved. He was bewildered when she began improving him more airily than ever. She complained of his vulgarity and what she asserted to be his slack ambition. “You think it’s terribly smart of you to feel superior. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t just laziness. You like to day-dream around labs. Why should you be spared the work of memorizing your materia medica and so on and so forth? All the others have to do it. No, I won’t kiss you. I want you to grow up and listen to reason.”