dhood of the race. We haven't got used to the new era--the
scientific era. And that is natural. Why, until less than three
generations ago there was really no such thing as science."

"I hadn't thought of that," admitted Norman. "We certainly have got on
very fast in those three generations."

"Rather fast. Not so fast, however, as we shall in the next three.
Science--chemistry--is going speedily to change all the conditions of
life because it will turn topsy-turvy all the ways of producing
things--food, clothing, shelter. Less than two generations ago men lived
much as they had for thousands of years. But it's very different to-day.
It will be inconceivably different to-morrow."

Norman could not get these ideas out of his brain. He began to
understand why Hallowell cared nothing about the active life of the
day--about its religion, politics, modes of labor, its habits of one
creature preying upon another. To-morrow, not religion, not politics,
but chemistry, not priests nor politicians, but chemists, would change
all that--and change it by the only methods that compel. An abstract
idea of liberty or justice can be rejected, evaded, nullified. But a
telephone, a steam engine, a mode of prolonging life--those realizations
of ideas _compel_.

When Dorothy came, Norman went into the garden with her in a frame of
mind so different from any he had ever before experienced that he
scarcely recognized himself. As the influence of the father's glowing
imagination of genius waned before the daughter's physical loveliness
and enchantment for him, he said to himself, "I'll keep away from him."
Why? He did not permit himself to go on to examine into his reasons. But
he could not conceal them from himself quickly enough to hide the
knowledge that they were moral.

"What is the matter with you to-day?" said Dorothy. "You are not a bit
interesting."

"Interested, you mean," he said with a smile of raillery, for he had
long since discovered that she was not without the feminine vanity that
commands the centering of all interest in the woman herself and resents
any wandering of thought as a slur upon her own powers of fascination.

"Well, interested then," said she. "You are thinking about something
else."

"Not now," he assured her.

But he left early. No sooner had he got away from the house than the
scientific dreaming vanished and he wished himself back with her
again--back where every glance at her gave him the most exqu