r and his
comfortable smattering of original sin could have saved Reed Opdyke
from being insupportable. Beauty like his, albeit manly, is bound to be
a certain handicap.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was to Reed Opdyke's influence that Scott owed the encouraging
plaudits of his chemistry professor.

In an elective system which, at that time, was still left quite
unmodified, Scott had happened upon the chemistry class by way of
filling up his courses for his sophomore year. He had been going on
with it indifferently for some months, when Opdyke had been transferred
to his division. Up to that time, Scott had liked the class but
temperately; that is, although it had seemed to him a useless frill
upon the garment of his education, he did not dislike it in the least,
and he had made a fair showing in his recitations.

Opdyke's coming into his division had changed all that. At first, Scott
merely had been possessed by a fury of desire to shine before his
idol's eyes. A little later on, Opdyke's manifest, albeit rather
casual, interest in the subject had led Scott to revise his earlier
notions carefully, to decide that there might be something in it, after
all. By the beginning of his junior year, Scott had won the tardy
attention of the head of the department. By the beginning of the
Christmas holidays of that junior year, the head of the department had
felt it his plain duty to explain to Scott that the road ahead of him
was likely to be an open one and easy. If he kept on as he had begun,
in time he might be head of a department on his own account. Absurd for
a fellow with a mind like his to be spending his time over rhetoric and
the classics! Science was his line, pure science; above all, chemistry.

And Scott had listened in silence, at first too much astounded by the
unexpected verdict to make answer. Then, as the head of the department
left off predicting and fell to making plans, Scott plucked up courage
to tell of the ministerial career supposedly ahead of him. The
professor, downright and enthusiastic in his utterances, pooh-poohed
the entire ministerial idea. Nonsense! Absurd! Spoil a chemist to make
a parson! Preposterous! Any one could preach, if he tried. Not one man
in a dozen could even make a quantitative analysis tally up, and get
anywhere near as much material out of it as went in. Waste on
flourishing gestures those lithe hands that were so obviously created
for the manipulation of such delicate things a