biologist, he's run all to body and brain. He's let his spirit get
famished a bit. Queer things--one hears, too--inevitable things."

"How do you mean?" she cried, quick to defend her hero, but eager with
curiosity about him.

"Oh, things you wouldn't understand. He's given up his chair at the
University."

There was a long silence. Then Marcella said definitely:

"Anyway, he's splendid. I love him." The doctor laughed and told her
it was a good thing she wasn't a student if she fell in love with
professors from their lectures.

"Well, go on with what you were saying," she said imperiously, and the
doctor began to think that he had not quite reckoned with Marcella's
passion for getting to the roots of things. But he expounded his theory
to her, telling her that before many years things that were miracles in
the time of Christ would be scientific bagatelles in the hospitals.

"We've been having a materialistic time, Marcella, ever since Huxley and
Darwin. Now we're coming to the swing of the pendulum. The body and its
appetites have got very strong. Soon we'll have them beat by the mind."

There was a long silence. Then, with a suddenness that disconcerted the
doctor, she asked him what Wullie had meant by saying that the Lashcairn
women took the man they needed, and went on strange roads.

He filled and lit his pipe before he answered her.

"If I told you you wouldn't understand. You'll come to it in time. When
you do, remember what I said to you. If you don't keep your body in hand
it's going to run away with you, like it ran away with your father into
yon barrel. See?"

"No," she said doubtfully. "Do you mean be like Aunt Janet?"

"God forbid! No, not like Aunt Janet. You'll see when you come to it,
Marcella. But remember that the nearest most of us ever get to the
perfect Trinity is a thing of shreds and patches. People don't manage
to be perfect."

"Christ?" ventured Marcella.

"No. He was brain and spirit without a body."

"Why, doctor, how about when He fasted in the wilderness--and the pain
on the cross?"

"Bodily pain is much easier to bear than bodily desire, Marcella. Your
poor father would have found it easier to be crucified than to bear his
longing for whisky. And Aunt Janet--ask her."

"She wouldn't tell me."

"No, I suppose she wouldn't. When she was young she saw a man she
wanted. And he was a man she couldn't have. Until she got dead as she is
now I expect she'd have thought cruci