or we are strong, and
to-morrow we die."

He busied himself with putting on his boots, and talked meanwhile in his
curt, resolute tones.

"What's the matter with you, Ossipon? You look glum and seek even my
company. I hear that you are seen constantly in places where men utter
foolish things over glasses of liquor. Why? Have you abandoned your
collection of women? They are the weak who feed the strong--eh?"

He stamped one foot, and picked up his other laced boot, heavy,
thick-soled, unblacked, mended many times. He smiled to himself grimly.

"Tell me, Ossipon, terrible man, has ever one of your victims killed
herself for you--or are your triumphs so far incomplete--for blood alone
puts a seal on greatness? Blood. Death. Look at history."

"You be damned," said Ossipon, without turning his head.

"Why? Let that be the hope of the weak, whose theology has invented hell
for the strong. Ossipon, my feeling for you is amicable contempt. You
couldn't kill a fly."

But rolling to the feast on the top of the omnibus the Professor lost his
high spirits. The contemplation of the multitudes thronging the
pavements extinguished his assurance under a load of doubt and uneasiness
which he could only shake off after a period of seclusion in the room
with the large cupboard closed by an enormous padlock.

"And so," said over his shoulder Comrade Ossipon, who sat on the seat
behind. "And so Michaelis dreams of a world like a beautiful and cheery
hospital."

"Just so. An immense charity for the healing of the weak," assented the
Professor sardonically.

"That's silly," admitted Ossipon. "You can't heal weakness. But after
all Michaelis may not be so far wrong. In two hundred years doctors will
rule the world. Science reigns already. It reigns in the shade
maybe--but it reigns. And all science must culminate at last in the
science of healing--not the weak, but the strong. Mankind wants to
live--to live."

"Mankind," asserted the Professor with a self-confident glitter of his
iron-rimmed spectacles, "does not know what it wants."

"But you do," growled Ossipon. "Just now you've been crying for
time--time. Well. The doctors will serve you out your time--if you are
good. You profess yourself to be one of the strong--because you carry in
your pocket enough stuff to send yourself and, say, twenty other people
into eternity. But eternity is a damned hole. It's time that you need.
You--if you met a man