He remembered how often Madeline Fox had hinted that it would be a tasty thing to go to the Grand, Zenith’s most resplendent hotel, but that was the last time he thought of Madeline that evening. He was absorbed in Leora. He found in her a casualness, a lack of prejudice, a directness, surprising in the daughter of Andrew Jackson Tozer. She was feminine but undemanding; she was never Improving and rarely shocked; she was neither flirtatious nor cold. She was indeed the first girl to whom he had ever talked without self-consciousness. It is doubtful if Leora herself had a chance to say anything, for he poured out his every confidence as a disciple of Gottlieb. To Madeline, Gottlieb was a wicked old man who made fun of the sanctities of Marriage and Easter lilies, to Clif, he was a bore, but Leora glowed as Martin banged the table and quoted his idol: “Up to the present, even in the work of Ehrlich, most research has been largely a matter of trial and error, the empirical method, which is the opposite of the scientific method, by which one seeks to establish a general law governing a group of phenomena so that he may predict what will happen.”
He intoned it reverently, staring across the table at her, almost glaring at her. He insisted, “Do you see where he leaves all these detail-grubbing, machine-made researchers buzzing in the manure heap just as much as he does the commercial docs? Do you get him? Do you?”
“Yes, I think I do. Anyway, I get your enthusiasm for him. But please don’t bully me so!”
“Was I bullying? I didn’t mean to. Only, when I get to thinking about the way most of these damned profs don’t even know what he’s up to—”
Martin was off again, and if Leora did not altogether understand the relation of the synthesis of antibodies to the work of Arrhenius, yet she listened with comfortable pleasure in his zeal, with none of Madeline Fox’s gently corrective admonitions.
She had to warn him that she must be at the hospital by ten.
“I’ve talked too much! Lord, I hope I haven’t bored you,” he blurted.
“I loved it.”
“And I was so technical, and so noisy— Oh, I am a chump!”
“I like having you trust me. I’m not ‘earnest,’ and I haven’t any brains whatever, but I do love it when my menfolks think I’m intelligent enough to hear what they really think and— Good night!”