" the Professor
would gladly have devoted it to that purpose. But the sense of
inevitableness gradually subdued him, and he received his wife's copy
of the _Investigator_ with a kind of impersonal curiosity. The review
was a long one, full of extracts: he saw, as he glanced over them, how
well they would look in a volume of "Selections." The reviewer began by
thanking his author "for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of
ringing optimism, of faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good,
which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent
nihilism.... It is well," the writer continued, "when such reminders
come to us not from the moralist but from the man of science--when from
the desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there rises this glorious
cry of faith and reconstruction."

The review was minute and exhaustive. Thanks no doubt to Harviss's
diplomacy, it had been given to the _Investigator's_ "best man," and
the Professor was startled by the bold eye with which his emancipated
fallacies confronted him. Under the reviewer's handling they made up
admirably as truths, and their author began to understand Harviss's
regret that they should be used for any less profitable purpose.

The _Investigator_, as Harviss phrased it, "set the pace," and the
other journals followed, finding it easier to let their critical
man-of-all-work play a variation on the first reviewer's theme than to
secure an expert to "do" the book afresh. But it was evident that the
Professor had captured his public, for all the resources of the
profession could not, as Harviss gleefully pointed out, have carried
the book so straight to the heart of the nation. There was something
noble in the way in which Harviss belittled his own share in the
achievement, and insisted on the inutility of shoving a book which had
started with such headway on.

"All I ask you is to admit that I saw what would happen," he said with
a touch of professional pride. "I knew you'd struck the right note--I
knew they'd be quoting you from Maine to San Francisco. Good as
fiction? It's better--it'll keep going longer."

"Will it?" said the Professor with a slight shudder. He was resigned to
an ephemeral triumph, but the thought of the book's persistency
frightened him.

"I should say so! Why, you fit in everywhere--science, theology,
natural history--and then the all-for-the-best element which is so
popular just now. Why, you come right in with t