'
 
 PRIESTS OF 
 PROGRESS 
 
 BY G. COLMORE r 
 
 Author of "The Angel and the Outcast," "A/Ladder 
 of Tears," "A. Daughter of Music," etc. 
 
 a man pran 
 the whole world and lose hit own soulf" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 B. W. DODGE & COMPANY 
 
 1908
 
 Copyrighted, 1908, by 
 B. W. DODGE & COMPANY 
 
 (All Rights Reserved) 
 Printed in the United States of America
 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 THE scientific theories and methods described, discussed, 
 or alluded to in this book are real theories and real 
 methods. I have ascribed to my characters certain meth- 
 ods of investigation recounted in scientific journals by the 
 men who have followed those methods. But I desire 
 strongly to emphasise the fact that all my characters, with- 
 out exception, as also their circumstances and surround- 
 ings, are essentially and entirely fictitious. 
 
 An appendix at the end of the book contains a list of 
 authorities for the actual theories and practices attributed 
 to those characters. 
 
 G. COLMOEE 
 
 2138696 '
 
 TO ALL THOSE 
 
 WHO HAVE HELPED ME IN" THE 
 
 WKITING OF THIS BOOK BY THE GIVING OF 
 
 KNOWLEDGE, TIME, OR SYMPATHY 
 
 THE BOOK IS DEDICATED
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THREE men sat round the fire, smoking. They were 
 young men, barely out of the period of studentship, 
 beginning the world. Before one lay success; before an- 
 other the straight, laborious path of mediocrity; the life 
 of the third was destined to be the voice of one crying in 
 the wilderness. 
 
 The room in which they sat was a lodging-house room, 
 ugly with an old-fashioned solid ugliness which has now 
 generally given way to the more meretricious demerits of 
 modern invention. The furniture was of mahogany, the 
 chairs and tables upholstered in horsehair; the wall- 
 paper was of a nondescript shade approaching, perhaps, 
 nearer to brown than to any other colour; the curtains 
 were of that terrible green which absorbs the light with- 
 out resting the eye; the carpet was thick enough to hold 
 vast accumulations of dust. The inevitable antimacassar 
 of course was there, crocheted in cotton, knitted in wool, 
 straightened out carefully each morning, to be crumpled 
 up into balls or cast into corners ere the day was done; 
 invariably, however, to survive contumely. For Mrs. 
 Deane could not bring herself to denude her apartments 
 of all elegance. "Young gentlemen will be young gentle- 
 men" was all she said when, each morning, desecration 
 
 5
 
 6 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 met her eye; and as the antimacassars were of stalwart 
 fibre, and the delinquent grew daily older, she replaced 
 them regularly with the persevering hope of the proverbial 
 spider. 
 
 The more particular in this respect was she, inasmuch 
 as the wax fruit, the shells, and the ornament from her 
 own wedding cake, with its shielding glass case, had been 
 resolutely banished from the mantelpiece. Percy Burdon 
 had impressed upon her that he was afraid of breaking 
 them; and the black marble shelf was now given up to 
 pipes, tobacco jars, and photographs chiefly of young 
 women in tights; for Percy was at the stage of affecting 
 the Gaiety Theatre, and his ideal of womanhood was 
 divided between the dancing girl and his cousin, Violet 
 Lowther. The cousin's photograph was on the mantel- 
 piece, too, in the centre, and Sidney Gale's eyes rested on 
 it as he smoked. 
 
 "Who's that?" he asked presently, pointing a pipe at 
 it, "the girl with all her clothes on?" 
 
 "Oh, that's my cousin David Miss Lowther." 
 
 "David? What an odd " 
 
 "Oh, she wasn't christened that; Violet's her proper 
 name. But when she was a little bit of a thing she was 
 discovered in the act of defying a bull with a catapult. 
 She was dubbed David on the spot, and the name stuck to 
 her. None of her own people ever call her anything else." 
 
 "Is that the great Dr. Lowther?" asked Edgar Hall. 
 
 Burdon nodded, trying to appear unconscious of the 
 distinction conferred by relationship with a man in the 
 forefront of medical science. 
 
 Hall's manner took on a momentary shade of deference. 
 "I had no idea he was your uncle," he said. "What 
 luck some people have!"
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS % 
 
 "What do you mean by luck? I've never scored by 
 being bis nephew that I can see." 
 
 "Perhaps not, because you're a rotter. Why, man, if 
 I were his nephew, I'd study under him." 
 
 "Don't take understudies." 
 
 "He'd take me. Besides, he must have assistants.*' 
 
 "Yes, I suppose so; oh, yes, of course. But Lord! if 
 you're under Uncle Bernard, you're so very much under; 
 he's sitting on you all the time." 
 
 Hall cast a contemptuous glance at the speaker, and re- 
 filled his pipe in silence. 
 
 The three young men were friends of circumstance; 
 they had been at the same public school, had gone through 
 the same medical course, were now starting in the same 
 profession. Hall and Burdon, moreover, had been at 
 Cambridge together. Gale was an Oxford man; but his 
 family and Hall's were acquainted, and they met at each 
 other's houses. 
 
 "Oh, by the way," said Gale, "I ran up against Jimmy 
 Coles as I came along, swelled visibly with satisfaction. 
 'Hulloa, old man,' said I, 'what's up? You look as if 
 you'd come into a fortune.' 'So I have,' said he, and 
 he's going to be married." 
 
 "Good for Jimmy !" said Burdon. 
 
 "Infernal ass !" said Hall. 
 
 "What's ass about it?" 
 
 "To go and saddle yourself with a wife before you've 
 got a practice! Even if a man had a private fortune, 
 which James hasn't " 
 
 "No ; but I fancy she has, from what he said." 
 
 "Had a private fortune," continued Hall imperturbably, 
 "it's a devil of a mistake. Wife at home, babies, domestic
 
 8 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 interests. I tell you that sort of thing plays the deuce 
 with a chap's chances/' 
 
 "You're so damned ambitious, old man/' observed 
 Burdon. 
 
 'I'm damned interested in what I'm going to do, if 
 that's what you mean. And if you're not, I don't see 
 the good of doing it." 
 
 "Bread and butter, my dear chap, and one's people at 
 one's back insisting upon one's having a career." 
 
 "Career !" Hall's thin lip curled. 
 
 "Besides, I am interested in it; only I don't think it's 
 the only thing in the world, that's all." 
 
 "No ; there are women in tights." 
 
 "I don't know that they're any the worse for that," 
 said Burdon stoutly. "They're as good, some of 'em, as 
 gold. Tights don't imply " 
 
 "That you're on the loose," put in Gale, thereby caus- 
 ing one of the ill-used antimacassars to be aimed at his 
 head. He dodged it successfully and went on speaking. 
 "It's no good you two fellows beginning to argue, because 
 you don't see one single thing in the world from the same 
 point of view. Percy, you're an ordinary human being; 
 and Hall's a well, a scientist." 
 
 "And what are you?" asked Hall. 
 
 "I'm a " Gale stretched himself. "The Lord only 
 
 knows." 
 
 "I know what you will be if you don't look out; and 
 that's a failure." 
 
 "Thanks, old chap. But may be; may very well be." 
 
 "It's all very well, you know, but rowdiness don't pay. 
 Passes in a student, but when a man gets to work " 
 
 "Pregnant pause that! Ain't it, Percy?" said Gale. 
 
 "Ass !" muttered Hall.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 9 
 
 "An ass in a lion's skin with a lion's mane, at any 
 rate," said Burdon. 
 
 The allusion was to Gale's tawny hair, whicH was in- 
 conveniently thick and strong; it had always heen cut, 
 according to Gale, yesterday, and always looked as if it 
 ought to be cut, at latest, to-morrow. Gale gave his head 
 a little shake, thereby causing disorder in the too exu- 
 berant locks, then passed his hand over them to smooth 
 them down again. It was a trick he had. 
 
 "Sidney Gale, M.M. Medical Moke. I wonder how 
 it would look on a door-plate I" said he. 
 
 "It'll be the only degree you'll arrive at if you don't 
 look out," declared Hall. 
 
 "A little captious, our friend, to-night, don't you think, 
 Percy? Hulloa! somebody's in a hurry. Hear those 
 hansom doors? And Jove, what a ring! Expecting any 
 startling denouement, old chap ? Because Hall and I " 
 
 Burdon shook his head and laughed. "Rather wish I 
 was. It's somebody for Cameron, I expect." 
 
 "Is that the man downstairs?" asked Hall; "the man 
 I met here once?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "A misguided old juggins with ideas about the Absolute." 
 
 "Don't know. He's not a bad sort, anyhow. He " 
 
 At that instant the door was flung open, and a man 
 stood on the threshold and sought Percy with his eyes. 
 
 "Mr. Burdon," said he, "come down to my room, please ! 
 I need your help."
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE man whom Hall had described as a misguided 
 old juggins was forty-eight, and hardly looked his 
 age. His brown hair was only slightly grizzled ; his beard, 
 close cut and pointed, was free from any touch of grey. 
 Hair and beard surrounded a face that would be best de- 
 scribed as quiet, were it not for the brilliant eyes, deeply 
 set, which looked out from beneath thick eyebrows, and 
 gave it a quality of arrestingness. 
 
 The three young men sprang to their feet as he spoke. 
 
 "Is it an accident?" asked Percy. 
 
 Cameron shrugged his shoulders. "Come and see !" 
 
 "We're all medicos," said Gale. "I suppose we can come 
 too?" 
 
 He turned to Hall as he said the last words, for Cameron 
 and Percy were already half-way downstairs, and, without 
 waiting for an answer, followed the others out of the room. 
 The flight of steps was a long one, but Gale had a way of 
 diminishing its length; he descended a few grades, then 
 placed his hands on the banisters and leapt down on to 
 the lower angle of the staircase. Hall went down in the 
 usual way, but as fast as that way permitted, for his 
 professional instincts were excited, and he was eager to 
 know the cause of Cameron's summons. 
 
 But when he entered Cameron's room his enthusiasm 
 died down. What he saw was not the least what he 
 expected or hoped to see. 
 
 10
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS II 
 
 At one end of the room was a square dining-table, and 
 on the table lay a dog, a collie; that it was in pain and 
 teror was evident; its eyes held the pleading look that 
 suffering calls into the eyes of all animals, becoming more 
 intense as the animal descends in the scale of sensitiveness 
 and intelligence. Round its neck was a bandage, and the 
 bandage held in place a tube inserted in the animal's 
 throat. Hall observed it for a moment; then, "What's 
 this ?" he asked. 
 
 There was a denunciatory inflection in his voice, and 
 the owner of the room threw him a quick glance. 
 
 "Dinna fash wi' questions," he said, suddenly breaking 
 into broad Scotch "My hand's out," he continued, turn- 
 ing to Burdon. "That's why I want your help." 
 
 "We ought to anaesthetise for this," said Gale. "Got 
 any chloroform?" 
 
 "Man, how did I come to forget it? I got everything 
 else on my way." 
 
 "Oh, Burdon's probably got some. He's always inhal- 
 ing." 
 
 "Yes let me see I was inhaling only this morning for 
 neuralgia. You know the cupboard on the " 
 
 "Go and get it yourself, old chap, as you know where 
 it is." 
 
 Burdon was out of the room and back again in a couple 
 of minutes; but during his absence Gale had unfastened 
 the bandage. 
 
 "Yes through the oesophagus and down into the 
 stomach. See?" he said. 
 
 All round the opening of the wound from which the 
 tube protruded were gangrenous sores, caused by the over- 
 flow of the destructive juices of the stomach.
 
 12 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "It's been in some time/' observed Burdon, coming 
 back. 
 
 "Keep your hand on his heart, Mr. Gale," said Cameron. 
 "I'll give the chloroform; and you, Mr. Burdon " 
 
 "No, no, you watch the heart, G.P.," broke in Gale, 
 addressing Burdon. "I'll do the surgery." 
 
 As the animal's muscles relaxed, as the consciousness 
 faded in its eyes, Gale withdrew the tube and proceeded to 
 wash out the wound and cleanse the open sores which 
 edged it round. 
 
 "You've deft hands," remarked Cameron approvingly. 
 
 Hall stood and looked on in silence. 
 
 "Now for the sutures," said Gale. 
 
 Cameron handed him the silk and needle, and Gale 
 began the stitching of the interior wound in the gullet; 
 but as he inserted the needle, the dog writhed and moaned. 
 
 "Anaesthesia not deep enough," he. said. "Try a whiff 
 or two more." 
 
 "Look out you don't kill," said Hall. It was the first 
 time he had spoken since his question on entering the 
 room. 
 
 "All right," returned Gale. "Just a wee bit deeper, 
 Mr. Cameron." 
 
 "Steady on!" cried Burdon. "By Jove! I thought it 
 had stopped altogether that time!" 
 
 The three faces gathered round the dog were all intent ; 
 Gale's eyes were steady with concentration. He thought 
 now no. more of the chloroform, of any adjunct of that 
 upon which he was engaged; that was the business of the 
 others ; all the consciousness of his brain was centred upon 
 the work of his hands. 
 
 The dog lay quite still now, and for one minute there 
 was silence. .Then Percy spoke. "He's gone, I believe."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 18 
 
 "Surely " began Cameron. 
 
 "He's done for. No doubt about it." 
 
 Gale put down the needle, and Cameron placed his hand 
 where Burdon's had been. There was no doubt that 
 Burdon was right; the heart, irregular of action, as are 
 the hearts of the majority of dogs, had ceased to beat under 
 the action of the chloroform, and no efforts availed to 
 set it to work again. 
 
 "I told you/' said Hall, coming forward, "that you had 
 to be careful in putting a dog under deep anaesthesia." 
 
 "Young man," answered .Cameron, *I probably was 
 aware of that fact before you were born. What I tried 
 to do was to touch the point which combines the persist- 
 ence of life with the minimum of suffering. What I did 
 was to miss it. At any rate, I saved yon poor beast from 
 a worse fate." 
 
 "What fate?" 
 
 "Well " The older man looked at the younger and 
 
 paused. "I don't know that I'm bound to tell you that, 
 for as far as I remember you came into my room, not by 
 my invitation, but your own wish. Still, I'm willing to 
 tell you. I'll tell you all," he said, glancing at the other 
 two young men. "I was in a shop this afternoon in 
 Campbell Street. The shopkeeper was engaged with a lady 
 when I went in, and while I was waiting the dog there 
 came rushing in. He was as you saw him a while ago, the 
 bandage round his neck and the tube in his throat." 
 
 "He came from the hospital," Hall broke in. 
 
 "Just so," answered Cameron in a tone which implied 
 that he desired no interruptions. "He had escaped from 
 the Campbell Street hospital and from a scientific experi- 
 ment. He lifted his fore-paws on to the counter and looked 
 at the shopman. If ever a dumb thing asked for help, that
 
 14. PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 creature asked for it then. The tears were streaming down 
 his face. I remembered my student days; I remembered 
 why I am not in practice now; I think quickly and decide 
 sometimes as quickly as I think." The Scotch words and 
 accent broke again into Cameron's speech. "I took the 
 puir beastie in my arms and was out of the shop and into 
 a hansom in a trice. I'm thinkin' there's ane experiment 
 they'll no finish." 
 
 "And I for one am glad," said Gale. 
 
 "Can't say I'm sorry," muttered Percy. 
 
 Hall hesitated, then, "Mr. Cameron," said he, "what you 
 choose to do is, I suppose, no business of mine, especially 
 as you have reminded me as you did not ask me to 
 take a hand in it. I gather that you were once a member 
 of the medical profession ; why you left if is also, I take it, 
 no business of mine. But you two fellows, what are you 
 doing in this galley? If I were to report your share in 
 this at headquarters, how would you look ?" 
 
 Burden's colour changed. "My dear man/' he began, 
 but Gale interrupted him. 
 
 "Bosh!" said he. "Don't go and make a greater ass 
 of yourself than Nature meant you for, Hall." 
 
 "All very well, but you don't seem to realise that you 
 two fellows have behaved like blacklegs, gone against the 
 laws, unwritten, if not declared " 
 
 "Oh, stow it!" broke in Gale again. He turned to 
 Cameron. "You'll excuse us now, sir. We'll take Hall 
 upstairs and give him a cigar or sit on his head. Go on, 
 Hall! Percy, don't forget your chloroform." 
 
 Hall bowed stiffly, Burdon clumsily, but both young 
 men left the room. 
 
 Gale, before he followed them, held out his hand. "I
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 15 
 
 say," he said, "blackleg or no blackleg, you know, I'm 
 jolly glad you carted off that dog." 
 
 Cameron took the hand and wrung it forcibly. 
 
 "Mon," said he, "if that's the way the wind blaws, 
 ye've no an easy gait to gang." 
 
 Half an hour later, as Gale descended the staircase, John 
 Cameron's door opened, at first cautiously, then wide. 
 
 "Ah, it is you, Mr. Gale," he said. "I thought it 
 might be the other one. Can you come in ?" 
 
 Gale hesitated. "Well, hardly now, I'm afraid. I'm 
 house surgeon at St. Anne's, you see, and " 
 
 "You must be back, of course." 
 
 "I wish I could." 
 
 "Well, come some other day. What's your best time?" 
 
 "I'm generally off duty between five and seven." 
 
 "Name your day, then, and I'll be sure of being in." 
 
 "I'll come to-morrow," said Gale impulsively. 
 
 "That's right. Then I'll expect you."' 
 
 "A queer old Johnny," said Gale to himself as he went 
 down the street; "but I'd like to have a talk with him 
 and hear what he's got to say."
 
 CHAPTEE III 
 
 THE next afternoon found Gale again in Hinde Street. 
 He did not go upstairs to see if Burdon were at 
 home, but asked the servant who opened the door to take 
 him at once to Cameron's room. 
 
 The room was respectably ugly, but with its drawn cur- 
 tains and blazing fire it had a comfortable look, especially 
 after the depressing atmosphere of the foggy street outside. 
 Tea was laid on the square table, a small white cloth, spread 
 cornerwise, partially concealing the thick tapestry cover 
 which veiled its cumbrous solidity. 
 
 "Come away in and sit down," was Cameron's welcome. 
 "I'm glad to see you. We'll have our tea and then a pipe." 
 
 Gale took the chair which his host placed for him by 
 the table, and Cameron poured out a cup of tea. "I don't 
 take it myself," he remarked, "so you won't mind if I only 
 look on?" 
 
 Gale was not without a shyness of his own, but there 
 was something about his host which set him at his ease, 
 and he ate bread and marmalade and drank tea with frank 
 enjoyment and a hearty appetite, undisturbed by the fact 
 that his host took neither food nor drink. Later on, he 
 wondered if he had done a wise thing in accepting John 
 Cameron's invitation; but while he made up for a hasty 
 lunch, and afterwards, when, pipe in mouth and tobacco 
 jar at elbow, he found himself seated in a leather arm- 
 chair opposite his host, he felt very glad that he had come. 
 
 16
 
 17 
 
 Cameron inspired him with sympathy and confidence; in- 
 terested him, too. Sidney Gale was one of the people who 
 begin life "expecting things to happen" ; and there was no 
 knowledge what possibilities were contained in this new 
 acquaintance. 
 
 The sympathy and confidence were apparently mutual, 
 for the first thing Cameron said after the pipes were fairly 
 started was, "Do you know why I asked you to come and 
 eee me, laddie ?" And on Gale's negative, "Because I took 
 a fancy to you/' he said. "I didn't take a fancy to your 
 friend/' he went on presently, "the one who stood and 
 looked on. He and I have vibrations that don't accord. 
 Young Burdon well, he's a good laddie enough, but he's 
 just like a thousand others, and you have but to put him 
 into the usual mould for him to take the usual shape. But 
 you're not quite that." 
 
 "Oh, I hope not," cried Gale. "I want to be " 
 
 He stopped and sought for a word, then laughed and 
 finished up with "unique." 
 
 "There are more ways than one of being that. You 
 may be a unique success, or a unique failure." 
 
 "No, no, sir, please! I bar failure." 
 
 "Yet it's grander sometimes than fame." 
 
 "You might have both. I mean," said Gale, shaking out 
 his hair and smoothing it down again, "I shouldn't mind 
 being a famous failure, coming to grief in a splendid way, 
 don't you know." 
 
 "By splendid you mean conspicuous, I suppose." 
 
 "Perhaps I do." 
 
 "You could stand melodrama, but not tragedy." 
 
 "I dare say that's about it. Yet tragedies, the great 
 tragedies, one does hear of them, you know." 
 
 "Does one?. ,Well, we'll leave that alone just now. I
 
 18 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 noticed yesterday I think I said so that you've deft 
 hands, real surgeon's hands, and you use them as a man 
 uses them who's born, not merely trained, to the Burgeon's 
 trade." 
 
 Gale blushed; he tried to look deprecating, but his eyes 
 sparkled. 
 
 "It's it's awfully nice of you to say so," was all he 
 could find to say. 
 
 "No, it's not," returned the other. "Awfully nice is not 
 at all what I am, in that or in anything else. But I seem 
 to see in you the makings of a great surgeon, and perhaps 
 of a great man; and last evening I was wondering which 
 you'd be." 
 
 "Can't I be both?" 
 
 The host sat and looked at his guest a few moments, but 
 there was more reflection than scrutiny in his eyes. 
 
 "Lawson Tait is," he said, "both famous and great ; but 
 Tait had the advantage of beginning his career in the fold 
 of orthodoxy. Advantage? the sine qua non I ought to 
 say, for to be unorthodox in medicine is to cut away from 
 yourself all chances of fame." 
 
 "Yet Tait " 
 
 Cameron held up his hand. "Tait had made his name 
 before he broke with convention. He is beyond the reach 
 of boycott, and they must acknowledge his greatness simply 
 because he has been able to prove that it is indisputable; 
 though, of course, when he's gone and can't answer them, 
 they'll begin to say he's unscientific as they do of Sir 
 William Fergusson, who, while he lived, was at the top of 
 the tree. Strange that the whole system of medical research 
 ia based on the policy of results, and yet, however splendid 
 results a man obtains in adding to the sum of knowledge 
 and in proving that knowledge by practical demonstration,
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 19 
 
 it counts for nothing if, in the gaining it, he departs from 
 the conventional methods I" 
 
 "But I suppose that so great a consensus of opinion " 
 
 began Gale, hut Cameron again interrupted him. 
 
 "There has been a consensus of opinion about all the false 
 ideas that have ever ruled the world ; and the men who first 
 rise up to proclaim them false are invariably condemned as 
 madmen, scoffed at as fools, feared and hated as revolution- 
 aries ; finally revered." Cameron paused. "So, at the last," 
 he added, in a softer tone, "at the end of evolution, when we 
 have outgrown the shams, we shall reach the truth." 
 
 Gale hesitated. "I was reading the other day," he began, 
 "a book by a man who called himself a mystic, and I came 
 across something rather like what you've just said. I 
 wonder if " 
 
 Cameron smiled. "If I'm a mystic, too? Well, if to 
 desire truth, to seek it constantly, and to think no labour 
 too great in the search, no painstaking too minute, no service 
 too humble if that is to be a mystic, then a mystic un- 
 doubtedly I am." 
 
 "Why, sir," cried Gale, "you have described a scientist !" 
 
 "And an artist," said a voice from the door; "if truth and 
 beauty are, as has been said, the same. Mr. Cameron," the 
 voice went on, "you said I might come and see you again, 
 and so well, here I am. With your love of truth, you 
 mustn't blame me for taking you at your word." 
 
 "Come in, come in, Miss Lowther ! I'm very glad to see 
 you. This is my friend Mr. Gale." 
 
 The girl at the door shut it behind her and came over to 
 the fire. 
 
 "You were so busy talking that you never heard my 
 knock," she said, "and I thought Percy must have made a 
 mistake and that you were out."
 
 20 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "I can recommend this chair," said Gale, pointing to 
 the one he had risen from. 
 
 "No, thank you, I' never sit in arm-chairs ; something 
 low and compact is what I like. No, Mr. Cameron, never 
 mind the teapot. I made Percy give me tea, of course." 
 
 Miss Lowther had seated herself on a sort of stuffed stool, 
 midway between the arm-chairs which stood one on each 
 side of the fireplace. "And now," she said, "I want you 
 to go on talking. What were you talking about when I 
 came in? It sounded interesting." 
 
 "I'd rather not pursue that particular subject just now," 
 answered Cameron. "Putting that one aside, we'll talk 
 about anything you choose. What do you like to talk about 
 best?" 
 
 "To be quite honest," said Miss Lowther, "I believe 
 there's nothing I like talking about so much as myself. But 
 one can't begin with that; it generally drifts round." 
 
 "/ should like to begin with it straight away," said 
 Gale, "because I want to know, after what you said when 
 you first came in, if you're an artist." 
 
 "Yes and no. Because I want to be so much, I sup- 
 pose I am a tiny bit." Miss Lowther turned to the young 
 man a deprecating face. "I do the thing that sounds so 
 dreadful I paint a little in water colours; that is to say, 
 I paint as much as I can, and as badly as few people dare." 
 
 Gale laughed. "You have, at any rate, the artist's 
 divine discontent." 
 
 "It hardly makes up for the rest." 
 
 "Do you go to a studio, or work at a school, or what?" 
 
 "I 'what'; just struggle along as best I may; and my 
 best, as I said, is bad. You see, ours is a scientific estab- 
 lishment, and if I suggest the Slade, or even a studio at 
 ^Fulham, father thinks I'm neurotic. I daren't persist, for
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 21 
 
 fear he should ask me to train a class of dogs in water 
 colours, and then start a series of experiments to discover 
 an art bacillus." 
 
 "What it is to be related to a man! Who else would 
 dare to scoff at Dr. Lowther?" 
 
 "Not scoff jest/' corrected Miss Lowther, "and one 
 only jests ebout the things and people one admires and 
 believes in. I have a great admiration for father and a 
 profound belief in him. Therefore you see?" 
 
 For a little while longer she sat chatting, obviously quite 
 at her ease both with the older man and the younger; 
 addressing herself to both, but answered almost entirely 
 by Gale; then she rose and asked for a hansom. It was 
 getting late, and "mother will be wondering what has 
 become of me." 
 
 John Cameron went to the door with her and put her 
 into the hansom. Gale stood by the fire and wondered how 
 Percy Burdon could keep her picture on the same shelf 
 as the photographs of the girls in tights. 
 
 Cameron came back into the room, sat down, and took 
 up his pipe. 
 
 "Sit down again !" he said. "You've time yet." He 
 lighted his pipe, took a few whiffs, then 
 
 "'Every lassie has her laddie, 
 
 None they say have I, 
 But all the lads they smile at me 
 When comin' through the rye,' " 
 
 he quoted. "That seems to me to -fit the young lady that's 
 just gone." 
 
 "I dare say she gets many smiles." 
 
 "Ay." Cameron puffed at his pipe in silence, his eyes 
 on the fire ; he was seemingly in a brown study, and Gale,
 
 22 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 sufficiently in sympathy with him to respect his mood, 
 made no attempt at conversation. 
 
 Presently Cameron turned his eyes from the fire to the 
 young man's face, and began to speak, taking up the 
 previous conversation at the very point at which Miss 
 Lowther's entrance had interrupted it ; so that for a moment 
 Gale had the feeling that her coming had been of the nature 
 of a vision, that the talk had ceased only for an instant, and 
 that in that instant he had dreamed a beautiful dream. 
 
 "To seek for truth," said Cameron, "means generally 
 that you have to separate yourself from those who profess 
 to follow her ; and sometimes that which impels to the search 
 takes its rise in emotion. That is why what you said last 
 night has caused me to think much about you." 
 
 "Why, what did I say?" asked Gale. He was still half 
 held by the dream. 
 
 "That you were glad of that which your friend, Mr. 
 Hall, regretted. I have known men begin to think because 
 the intellect has discovered a lack of logic in accepted 
 creeds ; more often I have seen them impelled to inquiry in 
 the first instance by feeling. You might almost divide 
 people into those two classes; those in whom intellectual 
 activity precedes and forms a basis for emotional convic- 
 tion, and those constrained by force of feeling to submit 
 their emotions to the tribunal of the intellect." 
 
 "Surely there is a third class, sir and a fourth. There 
 is emotion so blind that it is reckless of all but its own 
 force ; and intellect so so " 
 
 "Limited no, the French have a better word, borne; 
 limited in our colloquial use of it means small, and a 
 man may be brilliantly clever and yet borne; intellect so 
 borne, then, as to be blind to all but its own capacities and 
 achievements. Yes, you're right. But these are general
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 23 
 
 questions ; and what I wanted to say to you was something 
 personal." 
 
 Cameron paused so long that Gale, glancing at the 
 clock, was impelled to say, "Well, sir, what was it you 
 wanted to say to me ?" 
 
 "This: don't let your heart run away with your head! 
 Prove and weigh; keep your mental eyes and ears open; 
 try to storm no fortress until you are fully persuaded that 
 those who hold it are aliens and not kinsmen." 
 
 "I don't quite follow you. What fortress do you think 
 I am likely to storm ?" 
 
 "You. are by nature, unless I am much mistaken, a 
 fighter, perhaps a rebel. If you are only a fighter, you 
 will need no counsel from me; you will fight hard, but it 
 will be on the side of the majority, and you will win laurels. 
 
 But if you're a rebel " Cameron knocked the ashes 
 
 from his pipe, and laid it down beside him. "If you're a 
 rebel," he went on presently, "what I have to say to you 
 is don't rebel too soon ! Walk in the ranks for a while ; 
 let doubt travail and groan till conviction is mature; be 
 quite sure of yourself before you take your stand V 
 
 "But in what way? I don't feel as if I wanted to 
 rebel against anything." 
 
 "There was a sort of rebellion against the views of your 
 profession in your attitude towards yon poor dog last 
 night." 
 
 "Oh, I see what you mean. Well, frankly, I. don't like 
 the live experiment business. I like it so little that in the 
 classes I I " Gale shook out his hair in his confu- 
 sion. "After each demonstration, I always wanted to go 
 and and often went, sir on the the bust, so to speak, 
 to get it out of my head." He sat frowning and smooth- 
 ing down his hair. "For I'll bet my bottom dollar" he
 
 24 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 was thinking of his host "that he's a deuce of a proper 
 old chap." 
 
 The proper old chap said nothing but "And your friend ?" 
 
 "Hall? Oh, Hall's one idea was to do the experiment 
 himself." 
 
 "He'll get on." 
 
 "And I shall get over it, of course; they all do. It's a 
 weakness, I know." 
 
 "You'll get hardened, you think." 
 
 "I know I shall. I must; for of course it's necessary. 
 I accept that, and believe it; believe too, really, in its 
 Tightness. For ifs right it must be. It's right to inflict 
 a certain amount of pain on the animal world in order to 
 help humanity. It's kinder, really kinder, to be seemingly 
 cruel than merely sentimental." 
 
 "Does disease decrease the sum of it with these dis- 
 coveries? But no matter now. Accept, to begin with, 
 the canons of the profession; accept its methods; accept 
 everything orthodox except conclusions. Draw those for 
 yourself ; not too hurriedly." 
 
 "Thank you," said Gale, "thank you very much!" 
 
 As he walked back to the hospital he asked himself for 
 what precisely he had thanked Mr. Cameron. Was it 
 because he had interested him? It certainly could not 
 be because he had stirred in him anew those vague feel- 
 ings of doubt which it was" his constant endeavour to dis- 
 courage. 
 
 But he did not for long consider the question; his 
 thoughts flew back to that dream-like break in the con- 
 versation; flew back and rested there. It was of Miss 
 Lowther that the young man thought as he took his way 
 through the foggy streets ; and, thinking of her, he dreamed 
 a young man's dreams.
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 "T~\ AVID ! I was getting quite anxious." 
 
 JL-J "Dear mother, don't you know by this time that 
 you need never be anxious ? that I'm as well able to look 
 after myself as if I wore trousers instead of petticoats ?" 
 
 "I know you think you are. But I'm not sure that 
 the girls of the present day are not too independent." 
 
 "Can one be too independent?" 
 
 Mrs. Lowther sighed. "I've so often wondered," she said. 
 
 David came across the room, put her arm round the 
 slight figure in the arm-chair, and kissed her mother's 
 forehead. "You've been alone all the afternoon, I expect?" 
 
 Mrs. Lowther nodded. 
 
 "And you've got a bit hipped." 
 
 "Darling, I wish you wouldn't use Percy's slang." 
 
 "Is it slang? Honestly, I thought it was correctly 
 medical." 
 
 "I shouldn't say that Percy is ever correctly medical." 
 
 David laughed. "Perhaps not. By the way, I saw his 
 friend this afternoon the great Gale." 
 
 "Gale?" said Mrs. Lowther vaguely. "I thought hia 
 name was Hall." 
 
 "Oh, that's another. They share the treasure of Percy's 
 devotion between them; he kneels to Hall, and worships 
 Gale." 
 
 "Did you like him?" 
 
 26
 
 96 
 
 "Oh, yes, I think so. He's rather like shock-headed 
 Peter." 
 
 "He came to see Percy, I suppose ?" 
 
 "No, he was downstairs. I went down to see the mysteri- 
 ous Aberdonian." 
 
 "I never heard of her/* 
 
 "It's a him. N"o, it's not necessary to be shocked. He's 
 as old as the hills and as unsentimental as his native 
 granite." 
 
 "But, David " 
 
 "I assure you that fifty dowagers rolled into one wouldn't 
 be in it with Mr. Cameron as a chaperon. It was really 
 much more proper to meet Mr. Gale in his room -than in 
 Percy's." 
 
 "But how did you know him ?" 
 
 "Don't you remember my telling you that he came to 
 Percy's room the day Mrs. Vaughan and Emily and I. had 
 tea there? and that he invited us down to look at some 
 queer old black letter books he has ?" 
 
 "You tell me so much, my dear, that I forget some- 
 times." 
 
 "Well, he did, and he asked me to come again if I felt 
 inclined. And I felt inclined this afternoon." 
 
 "When David had gone upstairs Mrs. Lowther took up the 
 work she had laid down on her daughter's entrance a 
 knitted stocking. She knitted stocking after stocking ; not 
 because she was interested in such work, but because she 
 had a definite object in doing it; and the very uncon- 
 geniality of the task had its value in her eyes. 
 
 Mrs. Lowther was a woman who, at this period of her 
 life, would best be described as colourless. She had 
 married young, and was not many years over forty, an age 
 at which the modern woman considers that she has barely,
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 27 
 
 reached maturity and is as much entitled to take an active 
 part in life, to be interested and interesting, as are her 
 sisters in the twenties and thirties. With her delicate 
 features and slim figure, Bertha Lowther might have held 
 her own with many women younger than herself in years ; 
 but she bore upon her person, not to say her personality, 
 the hall-mark of a previous generation, and was unmistak- 
 ably relegated to a clearly defined shelf marked "middle 
 age." Her dress, perfectly neat, showed no touch of 
 either smartness or individuality; her hair, faded but 
 not grey, was parted down the middle and drawn back in 
 a plain downward sweep from her face ; and she wore a cap, 
 a small, formless, quite unpicturesque compound of white 
 lace and mauve ribbon. Her physique invited her to look 
 several years younger than she was; her choice of apparel 
 charged her with many more than she had seen: she 
 might have passed for thirty-six or seven; the impression 
 she conveyed was of a woman advanced in the fifties. 
 
 People as a rule did not take much notice of Mrs. 
 Lowther. Among her husband's acquaintances she counted 
 as a. nonentity; in his house she held much the same posi- 
 tion as the cat; except that, with almost uniform success, 
 she conducted the housekeeping. It could not be said that 
 she was not "in the frame," as the French say, in the Harley 
 Street household ; but she was as a piece of still life in the 
 background of the picture, rather than a living figure. Only 
 with her daughter was she on terms of any companion- 
 ship, and with an old friend, Miss Isabel Barker, who re- 
 ceived paying guests at Maida Hill, and came occasionally 
 to spend the day in Harley Street. 
 
 David was fond of her mother, with a pitying sort of 
 fondness; the protective instinct was awake in it, but 
 associated with a measure of condescension of which she
 
 28 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 was herself unaware. Mother was a dear, of course, and so 
 
 unselfish; but She never filled up the pause in her 
 
 thought; loyalty kept it blank; but had the thought com- 
 pleted itself, it would have run: "she has no character." 
 David Lowther adored to use her own expression char- 
 acter, purpose, daring,, success ; and all her admiration, all 
 the affection which springs from pride in the object which 
 evokes it, was given to her father. Neither of her parents 
 was altogether sympathetic to her; and with her father she 
 was never, perhaps, entirely at her ease ; but her great desire 
 was to win his approval, and the idea that he might think 
 her foolish or weak was almost sufficient to deter her from 
 the pursuit of a chosen course or an incipient thought. Al- 
 most, yet not altogether ; so that she clung to her painting 
 in spite of the fact that Dr. Lowther had an open contempt 
 for art; and cherished a secret inclination towards brawn 
 velvet coats and turned-down collars, though she was well 
 aware that, while her father looked down on art, he looked 
 with yet more scornful gaze on artists. 
 
 Upstairs, in her own private domain, David played for 
 a little while at being an artist. A tiny dressing-room was 
 attached to her bedroom, and from this all the furniture 
 which should have filled it had been cleared: it contained 
 only a couple of easels, a deal table, and a painting stool. 
 The floor was bare and the window uncurtained; on the 
 table were painting boxes, sketching blocks, and drawing 
 paper. A sketch stood on one of the easels; on the other 
 hung a piece of brilliant scarlet silk embroidered in gold; 
 one or two sketches and drawings were pinned against the 
 wall. David stood for a minute regarding the general 
 effect: she had a dramatic sense and liked her surround- 
 ings to be typical of her ideas. 
 
 "It's not bad," she said after a pause of critical survey.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 29 
 
 "It certainly looks 'struggling/ " she sighed. "The worst 
 part is the things themselves." 
 
 She went forward and looked at the half-finished paint- 
 ing on the easel. Very crude it was, very untaught ; David 
 had tried to catch the effect of a sunset behind a fore- 
 ground of roofs and chimney pots, and the result was not a 
 success. Presently she went back into the bedroom, took 
 off her hat and her brown walking dress, and put on a 
 sort of overall made of coarse pink cotton. It was a be- 
 coming garment, and she was conscious of the fact ; but a 
 few stains and smudges of paint gave it a professional air. 
 Thus clad, she returned to the little studio, and, having 
 turned on all the electric light available, proceeded to work 
 at her sunset. 
 
 Some artistic feeling she certainly possessed, something 
 there was within her which asked and strove for expres- 
 sion ; but though she felt truly, she did not see accurately, 
 and, destitute as she was of knowledge and training, she 
 lacked power to embody the ideas which she conceived, 
 or even correctly to portray the objects which she beheld. 
 Nevertheless, it was delightful to get away from the 
 commonplace world for a time, and be actually an artist, 
 positively painting in a real substantial studio. Delight- 
 ful it was for a time ; yet at the end of twenty minutes or 
 so David put down her palette and brushes with an ex- 
 clamation of disgust. "I don't know really whether I 
 hadn't better give it all up and take to science," she thought. 
 She turned off the light, went back to her bedroom, and 
 sat down in front of the fire. She had expressed her 
 preference in Mr. Cameron's room for a chair that was 
 low and not too large, and here on the hearthrug was her 
 ideal of what a seat should be; a soft, solid mass of up- 
 holstery, half stool, half cushion; backless, but as David
 
 30 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 never leant back when she was thinking, but always for- 
 ward, and as she only sat there when she wanted to think 
 and not when she wanted to rest, that did not matter. 
 
 "At any rate, in science I should be taught and helped," 
 she was thinking now; "and after all it's a splendid field, 
 for a woman especially. Fancy being like Madame Curie 
 and having the scientists coming from all parts of the world 
 to see one I" She gave an audible chuckle. "What fun !" 
 
 There came a knock at the door. "Come in!" Then, 
 as the door opened, "Oh, it's you, Emma," David said. 
 "Surely it's not dressing-time yet ?" 
 
 "Not quite, miss, but Mrs. Lowther wished me to tell 
 you that Professor Cranley-Chance is coming to dinner. 
 She forgot to mention it." 
 
 " Oh, well, I suppose that means that I'm to wear a dress 
 and not a tea-gown. Let me see! my white and gold, I 
 think, Emma, please. It seems a waste," David was 
 thinking to herself; "I suppose he's some fusty, musty old 
 thing. But I haven't got anything else." 
 
 "It's all very well," her thoughts ran on, as she dressed, 
 "father can say what he likes, but artists are a better- 
 looking lot than scientists; and I don't care what any- 
 body says, looks count for a good deal in the world. Yes, 
 bronze shoes, Emma, but the second best ones will do."
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 "pROFESSOR CRANLEY-CHANCE." 
 
 JL Mrs. Lowther rose from her chair by the fire to 
 
 receive the guest. The doctor was not yet down, and she 
 particularly disliked receiving her husband's friends when 
 her husband was not there to bear the brunt of entertaining 
 them. 
 
 David, however, was prepared to come to the rescue. 
 "Father will be here directly," she said. "Won't you sit 
 down?" 
 
 The professor was a big man, with a strong and, as many 
 thought, a handsome face; noted in scientific circles, and 
 recently to be met in that wider, more heterogeneous com- 
 pany known as Society. As David observed "as she did 
 instantly his well-made clothes, correct tie, and patent- 
 leather shoes, she realised that he was neither musty nor 
 fusty, and was glad that she had put on the "white and 
 gold" ; she also became conscious that the second best shoes 
 were just a trifle worn at the tips of the toes. 
 
 The professor shook hands with his hostess, but his 
 eyes went past her, the moment he entered the room, to 
 her daughter. He was a man who, when he concerned 
 himself at all with women, liked them to be good-looking, 
 and Miss Lowther, he told himself, had good looks of a 
 kind he admired. Many people were of Professor Chance's 
 opinion ; David Lowther was generally acknowledged to be 
 a nice-looking girl; though many of her acquaintances 
 
 81
 
 32 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 refused to credit her with the more positive quality of 
 prettiness. A not too friendly critic had once called her a 
 brown girl, and there was truth in the criticism, though her 
 brownness was, in the eyes of many, one of her charms. 
 Her hair was brown, a brilliant, decided brown; her skin, 
 fair and clear, had a look as though it had been faintly 
 tanned by the sun; her eyes were a curious mixture of 
 brown and grey. Her face was somewhat wide, the fore- 
 head broad and low, the eyes set far apart, the chin short 
 and full. Though she might lack power of expression in 
 the art which she had elected to follow, she was able 
 with an ability often denied to those who can paint beauti- 
 ful pictures to express her sense of beauty in her dress; 
 and this evening, though she had expected to see only an 
 uninteresting old gentleman of the fogey type, the artist 
 element had not failed to assert itself. She possessed, too, 
 the rare gift of being able to place a flower in her hair at 
 just the right spot, at just the right angle, and the becom- 
 ing effect of her flowing white gown with its gold trimming 
 was heightened and completed by a yellow rose which 
 showed itself on the left side of her well-dressed head. As 
 she stood in the shaded light, the flames from the fire 
 throwing a moving brilliance on the satin whiteness of her 
 gown, Cranley- Chance thought he had rarely seen a woman 
 who had better pleased him; and when she sat down he 
 took a chair near her, and ignoring, as most people ignored, 
 her mother's presence, set himself to find out what as he 
 expressed it to himself she was made of. 
 
 He had not got further in his investigations than to 
 discover that Miss Lowther objected to fog and detested 
 the English winter, when her father came in; and after 
 shaking hands, host and guest retreated to that refuge of 
 British self-consciousness, the hearthrug, where, fortified
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 3S 
 
 apparently by the sensation of heat in the back, the 
 Englishman appears more at his ease than in any other 
 part of the room. Not that Dr. Lowther suffered from 
 self -consciousness ; he had too much confidence in himself 
 to be a prey to any form of shyness; he stood firm upon 
 the rock of success, and had never stumbled on the way over 
 doubts of his own ability. A man of middle height and 
 middle age, strong in physique and brain, with a good- 
 looking face and slightly arrogant manner, he was popular 
 in his profession and in the world of science generally. 
 Patients came from far and wide to consult Dr. Lowther; 
 scientific brethren received his opinions with deference. He 
 was generous in helping on ability of a positive and defi- 
 nite type, relentless in opposing all that appeared to him 
 futile or weak. He was fond of his daughter, partly be- 
 cause she sometimes took her own way; he despised his 
 wife, chiefly because she always submitted to his. 
 
 At dinner Professor Chance sat opposite Miss Lowther, 
 and a tall vase of flowers prevented his looking at her as 
 much as he wished. 
 
 "Of course they'll talk shop," thought David, as she 
 settled herself in her chair. Her mental tone was one of 
 resignation; she was used to these friends of her father's, 
 who came to dinner at short notice, and had accustomed 
 herself not to listen to their conversation. 
 
 The doctor and his guest began with the discussion of 
 men fellow-scientists; from men they passed to matter, 
 from matter to bacilli, from bacilli to the most recently 
 discovered serum. David lent a half attention to the 
 beginning of the talk, but at the first mention of sensory 
 nerves she retreated to the citadel of her own interests, 
 and by the time dessert was on the table she was far away 
 from the fruit she was eating. She was plunged back into
 
 84 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 her actual surroundings by an astonishing fact: Mrs. 
 Lowther had joined in the conversation. 
 
 "Evil can never work anything but evil," she was say- 
 ing, when David woke up. "How do you know that these 
 serums are not laying the foundation of diseases worse than 
 those they are supposed to cure ?" 
 
 "Sera, my dear/' corrected the doctor. 
 "The form of the plural hardly alters the argument, 
 does it?" said Cranley- Chance kindly, after a glance at 
 his hostess's face. "Your mother/' he went on, trying to 
 look at David round the vase of flowers, "is fighting the 
 battle of the sentimentalists." 
 
 "Against intellect and humanity," added Dr. Lowther. 
 David glanced from father to mother. The one face 
 wore a disdainful smile; the other looked not far from 
 tears. 
 
 "Which side do you take?" asked the professor, getting, 
 this time, a really good view of her. 
 "I? Oh, the weakest, of course." 
 'Then side with your mother," said Lowther. 
 "Yes, mother and I will side together in the drawing- 
 room." David glanced at her mother as she spoke, and 
 the woman and the girl rose together. 
 
 Chance held the door open as they passed out. "She 
 
 moves well," he said to himself as he closed it behind them. 
 
 "Oh, David!" said Mrs. Lowther in the drawing-room; 
 
 the threatening tears had been driven away, but her voice 
 
 was tremulous. 
 
 "Dear mother, whatever did you do it for? I've never 
 heard you contradict anything father said before." 
 
 "I don't know. Something took possession of me and 
 made me speak before I knew what I was saying." 
 David's eyes glowed. "Is it there still the something?"
 
 35 
 
 Mrs. Lowther shook her head. "No; it was a ghost of 
 something that is dead." 
 
 "And ghosts only appear for a moment ; they don't stay." 
 The girl's voice was rueful ; this ghost had vested her moth- 
 er with a new interest; she wished it could have remained 
 longer in possession of the unobtrusive personality. 
 
 "Not visibly. David, will you give me my knitting?" 
 
 Mrs. Lowther, in her grey dress, a grey too drab in tone, 
 too dark in shade, to be either pretty in itself or becoming 
 to her pale face, sat down and knitted with the monotonous 
 regularity which David associated with all that her mother 
 did, and which frequently had an irritating effect on the 
 girl's nerves, so machine-like it was, so lacking in spon- 
 taneity or the suggestion, even, of interest. 
 
 "Mother," said David suddenly, "I wish you'd drop a 
 stitch." 
 
 "Why, dear?" 
 
 "Because oh, because you'd have to stop and pick it 
 up again. It it would make a break." 
 
 "I don't know" Mrs. Lowther looked up and smiled a 
 little "I don't know that I want to make a break." 
 
 "It's dreadful to go on and on, working at a thing that 
 doesn't interest you." 
 
 "But it does interest me; and it's by working steadily, 
 in the way that seems to make you impatient, that I get 
 through as much as I do." 
 
 "Your whole life's like a piece of knitting; plain knit- 
 ting, without any ribs in it, or even a dropped stitch by 
 way of variety." 
 
 There was a note of protesting contempt in David's 
 voice. 
 Mrs. Lowther shook her head. "I dropped stitches once
 
 36 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 and did not pick them up again. When you do that, your 
 life is apt to unravel, and the only way is to live it quietly." 
 
 Back into David's mind and heart, back into her eyes, 
 rushed the interest that, but a few minutes ago, her mother 
 had for the first time stirred in her. She left the mantel- 
 piece, by which she had been standing, came forward im- 
 pulsively and knelt by the low chair. 
 
 "Mother," she said, with coaxing eagerness, "tell me 
 about the dropped stitches.'* 
 
 "I couldn't." Then suddenly Mrs. Lowther put down 
 her knitting and held her face for a minute to her daugh- 
 ter's face. "Whatever happens to you in life," she said 
 hurriedly, "hold fast to the things you believe in really 
 believe. Don't let anybody or anything come between you 
 and what you feel to be the truth !" She drew away again. 
 "Don't ask me any more, David, but fetch me another 
 skein of wool. You know where they are ; in the left-hand 
 top drawer of the wardrobe." 
 
 When David came downstairs again her father and 
 Chance were at the drawing-room door, and the three 
 entered the room together. 
 
 "You don't mind my going on with my knitting?" said 
 Mrs. Lowther in the perfunctory tone in which a man, in- 
 tending to smoke, says to a woman, "You don't mind my 
 cigar?" 
 
 The professor gave the answer that the woman on sucli 
 an occasion generally gives: "Not at all"; and then he 
 asked himself how the deuce he was going to get an oppor- 
 tunity of finding out what that girl was made of. 
 
 He did not get the chance at all that evening, for, 
 while he was longing to talk what can best be described 
 as "man and woman" to Miss Lowther, he was obliged, by 
 politeness and his reputation, to discuss scientific medicine
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 37 
 
 with his host. The doctor and his wife showed no disposi- 
 tion to play Darby and Joan in one corner while he amused 
 himself with their daughter in another; and as Miss 
 Lowther apparently did not take an interest in scientific 
 medicine, and her father declined to wander to more frivol- 
 ous topics, it was impossible to draw her into the conver- 
 sation. He himself was not the least in the mood for 
 professional conversation, and he rose at last in despair. 
 
 "It's getting late/' he said. 
 
 "Not at all, my dear fellow. It's barely half -past ten." 
 
 "Late, considering, I mean, that I have work I must 
 do to-night." 
 
 When Chance had gone Mrs. Lowther rose, rolled up 
 her knitting, and put it in a pale-blue work-basket which 
 stood on a table in a far corner of the room. 
 
 "I suppose you're coming upstairs now, David," she said. 
 "You were very late last night, and ought to have a good 
 long sleep. Good-night, Bernard." 
 
 The doctor was sitting in an arm-chair reading the 
 Pall Mall Gazette. He turned his head as she spoke, and 
 for an instant the eyes of husband and wife met. It was 
 not often that this husband and wife looked into each 
 other's eyes; now in the man's glance was a question; in 
 the woman's the answer he wished to find there. He re- 
 sumed his reading with complacent satisfaction. 
 
 Upstairs in her own room, with locked door, Mrs. 
 Lowther sat, still in the grey silk dress, and suffered the 
 bitterness that Peter suffered after he had denied his 
 Lord; the bitterness that must be suffered by all those 
 souls whose fineness of perception is in excess of their 
 moral courage. 
 
 David, meanwhile, was recalling the evening's incidents ; 
 her mother's flushed, disturbed face at the dinner table,
 
 38 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 her father's with the protruding under lip which was 
 always a sign of displeasure or contempt. "Which side 
 do you take?" Chance had asked, and she had answered 
 on the spur of the moment, "The weakest, of course." In 
 the momentary circumstances the answer had been a true 
 one; her impulse had been to stand by the distressed- 
 looking woman at the head of the table; and there could 
 be no doubt that that woman typified feebleness, while 
 on the face opposite her was the consciousness of strength. 
 Yet hitherto, decidedly and always, David's sympathy had 
 been with the strong; feebleness had presented itself to 
 her as a fault, futility as a crime; had Chance put his 
 question as an abstract proposition, her reply would have 
 been the direct contrary of that to which she had been 
 prompted by the emotion of the moment. 
 
 On the low soft seat on the hearthrug, her elbows on 
 her knees, her chin in her hands, a dim idea that was not 
 yet a thought took filmy form in David's mind. "Was it 
 possible, perhaps, to admire strength and to love it, to 
 desire it for oneself as a possession and weapon; and yet 
 and yet, to use it, when inherent or attained, not to 
 procure success or find the path to fame, but to protect the 
 feeble, the un-strong? With a natural inclination to wan- 
 der from beaten paths, she preferred reading the Apocry- 
 pha to the canonical scriptures, and running in her head 
 were words from Esdras : "This present life is not the end 
 where much glory doth abide; therefore have they prayed 
 for the weak." 
 
 "Well, I don't intend to be weak; I don't want to be 
 prayed for; I want to do something," was the final out- 
 come of her reflections. "I shall insist upon father letting 
 me go to the Slade, or at least in listening to what I have 
 to say."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 39 
 
 Cranley-Chance, on his way home, said to himself that 
 Lowther was too fond of talking shop. "It's all very well ; 
 but in season and out of season it gets a bit tough, by 
 Jove !" 
 
 Shop had been decidedly out of season to-night; he had 
 met a pretty girl, more than a pretty girl, a girl who in- 
 terested him, and he had been in the mood to talk to her. 
 As his hansom sped along, the thought of Miss Lowther 
 in her white and gold dress with the yellow rose in her 
 brown hair was a pleasant vision before his mental eyes; 
 and he too, like Sidney Gale, dreamed dreams. But Gale's 
 were the dreams of a quite young man, whose youth was 
 gilded by chivalry; and Cranley-Chance had lived through 
 half his life, and the ways in which he had walked had 
 given him far other ideas of existence, its meanings and 
 its aims, than were those of Sidney Gale.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 A WOMAN waited in the surgical ward of St. Anne's 
 Hospital. In her eyes was fear, the fear that lay 
 coiled about her heart, causing it to beat with quick tremu- 
 lous pulsations. 
 
 She was a new inmate, and had only come in the eve- 
 ning before, and she had a horror of "the 'orspital" ; that 
 horror and distrust which are so widespead amongst the 
 poor. Terrible tales had she heard of neighbours and 
 neighbours' friends who had entered those dread build- 
 ings hoping for ease from their suffering, and who had 
 come forth maimed instead of aided. Some, many indeed, 
 had really been relieved, some had been cured; but it was 
 not of these she was thinking now, though indeed she 
 tried to think of them, hoping to swell her courage with 
 the thought; her mind dwelt on those others, the victims 
 of unnecessary operations, as they seemed to themselves 
 and their friends. 
 
 The visiting lady for her street had pooh-poohed, to be 
 sure, her accounts of the goings-on in hospitals, which, 
 she had said, were the most directly and decidedly bene- 
 ficial of all the philanthropic institutions of the country. 
 Sarah Jennings, waiting now to be operated upon, could 
 not remember the words the lady had used, but she recalled 
 their meaning, and tried to derive comfort from the as- 
 surance it contained. Yet the thought would come the 
 visiting lady knew nothing about it, and she and her 
 
 40
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 41 
 
 friends did. Ladies were rich; and oh, the blessedness of 
 wealth ! To be able to lie in a room by yourself, with only 
 nurse and friends to tend or visit you; to be able to pay 
 for attention and skill in coin of the realm; not as the 
 poor had to pay. Oh, yes, it was right, of course; it was 
 justice, if you got medicine and nursing and doctoring 
 for nothing, that you should give something in return. 
 But to lie all but naked, as Jane Carter had lain, and to 
 have the students crowding round to see the result of the 
 surgeon's manipulations; to have one after the other com- 
 ing to investigate, to learn; to be conscious all the time, 
 and quivering with the shame and the tension of it ! She 
 herself would have nothing of that kind to endure; her 
 trouble was in her face; but if they should make a lesson 
 
 of her, try any of their tricks It was all very well for 
 
 parsons and "sich" to say it was ignorance that made the 
 poor shrink from trusting themselves in hospitals. "Igno- 
 rance !" Sarah Jennings was thinking. "It's because we 
 know." And thinking thus, her fear and nervousness in- 
 creased. 
 
 A young man passed down the ward; something in the 
 woman's face arrested him, for he had seeing eyes, and 
 his residence at St. Anne's had shown him not only some 
 of the ills which flesh is heir to, but something also of the 
 human nature clothed upon by that flesh. He stopped 
 and spoke. 
 
 "Well, Mrs. let me see Mrs. Jennings, you came in 
 last night, didn't you? What is it?" 
 
 "Oh, sir, it's to be soon, the operation, and I'm afraid." 
 
 "No, come now, there's nothing to be afraid of. Why, 
 ulceration of the skin, that's just a surface thing; the 
 operation's a mere nothing. You won't feel it under the 
 anaesthetic, and you'll be well enough to go out in no time."
 
 42 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 The hearty assurance of his tone was comforting: Mrs. 
 Jennings' face relaxed. 
 
 "Will you be there, sir?" she asked. 
 
 Gale nodded. "I'll be there. Don't you be afraid, 
 mother, it'll be all right." He nodded again, and passed on. 
 
 Half an hour later he entered the operating theatre. A 
 large number of students was seated on the half circle of 
 benches which sloped up from the operating table ; chatting, 
 joking, waiting for the surgeon^ and his patient. 
 
 "What a lot of fellows for such a small affair," thought 
 Gale. "I suppose they're hard up for something to do." 
 
 Had Gale looked on the Notice Board, he would have 
 seen that the operation about to take place was of greater 
 magnitude than he supposed; it was characteristic of him 
 that he had not looked. One of his methods of teaching 
 himself was to study the subjects of coming operations, 
 and to determine from that study what the operation was 
 likely to be. 
 
 A couple of nurses were present, with their basins and 
 cotton wool, and with them the students kept up a desul- 
 tory and chaffing conversation, presently to be hushed, as 
 the operator, followed by a junior surgeon and the anaes- 
 thetist, entered the theatre. Gale was to act as dresser. 
 
 The patient was led in by a third nurse. Her face was 
 very pale, her lips quivered, she walked feebly. She looked 
 round for Gale, and found him at a glance ; the tall, high- 
 shouldered form with the slight stoop would have been 
 easily distinguishable in a much larger group than the one 
 then assembled; and Gale's personality, moreover, was 
 strong enough to make his presence felt in other ways than 
 through his physical characteristics. He gave a little nod 
 of reassurance when he met those searching eyes, thinking 
 to himself the while : " That woman ought to have been put
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 43 
 
 under the anesthetic before she was. brought in ; she's half 
 daft with fright." 
 
 Sarah Jennings, now that the dread moment was actu- 
 ally come, behaved with resigned passivity. She made no 
 resistance, uttered no sound, as she was lifted on to the 
 table; and in a minute the anaesthetist had freed her from 
 the consciousness of her surroundings. 
 
 The surgeons' coats were off, their arms bared; the 
 operator addressed the students. 
 
 " Gentlemen, I am about to perform an important opera- 
 tion, the removal of the superior maxilla,'' 
 
 The superior maxilla ! Gale started forward. That was 
 an operation which was performed only for actual disease of 
 the bone; and the sore which defaced the cheek of the un- 
 conscious woman on the table was but a surface wound. 
 
 " Surely " he began. 
 
 "Mr. Gale ?" The surgeon frowned affronted in- 
 quiry. 
 
 "Surely," said Gale again, "for ulceration of the 
 skin " 
 
 "You will allow me to know what I am about." 
 
 Gale stepped back, biting his lip. It was unheard-of 
 temerity to remonstrate with Moreton Shand; it would 
 have been useless hardihood to make further protest. He 
 folded his arms and stood silent, shaking his hair out, as 
 he moved back, and forgetting, in the effort of controlling 
 himself, to smooth it down again. 
 
 The operation began. The central incisor tooth was 
 extracted and an incision made down to the bone; the 
 junior surgeon assisting in securing the larger arteries as 
 they were divided, the nurses standing ready with sutures 
 and cotton wool. The students leaned forward, watch- 
 ing intently. It was indeed an important operation, a
 
 44 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 difficult and a dangerous one, and a great deal was to be 
 learned from witnessing it. Shand was a brilliant surgeon, 
 speedy and deft, but there was much to be done, and it 
 required all the skill of Carter, the anaesthetist, to keep the 
 patient under the influence of chloroform during the neces- 
 sary period. To maintain a condition of anaesthesia for 
 long is not an easy thing, and in this case the difficulty was 
 enhanced by the cutting ' through of the palate and the 
 nasal and alveolar processes. Carter had his tube well down 
 the woman's throat, but for all his care she twisted and 
 wriggled under the surgeon's hands. 
 
 Gale found himself wondering whether such movements, 
 which he had seen constantly in animals under experiment, 
 could be always referred to reflex action. If so, why did 
 Carter go on pumping in the chloroform? 
 
 At last the cheek bone was severed from the bones and 
 processes to which normally it is attached, and Shand was 
 ready for the lion forceps, so named from the fact that Sir 
 William Fergusson, who invented them, modelled them 
 from a lion's teeth. With the powerful grip they afforded, 
 the operator wrenched away the loosened bone; then came 
 the tying of the maxillary artery ; the plugging of the wound 
 with cotton wool to restrain the smaller vessels ; and finally, 
 when the bleeding had stopped, the joining of the cuts on 
 cheek and lip with horsehair sutures and hair-lip pins. 1 
 
 The operation was over, and it was a complete success. 
 
 Still unconscious, Sarah Jennings was borne to her bed 
 in the surgical ward. She had felt nothing, or almost 
 nothing, of the action of knife and forceps; but she would 
 awake soon to physical agony, and to the knowledge that 
 she was maimed and disfigured for life. 
 
 That evening Gale spent his free time in rapid walking. 
 
 'App. 2.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 45 
 
 The London streets had long been alike his playground and 
 his refuge, almost his confidant. In some moods he would 
 fling himself into the whirl of their life, though with the 
 spectator element never entirely eliminated; in others he 
 would pass through their crowds aloof from their gaiety, 
 misery, and movement. To-night he chose for his perambu- 
 lations one of those quarters which are both bustling and 
 mean, noisy and yet dull. 
 
 It was spring now, and out in the country the spring 
 twilight was stealing in soft wistfulness over field, forest, 
 and heath; here, in the sordid streets, its "sober livery" 
 was changed from grey to drab ; for shy stars' that showed 
 in the shelter of growing night, were flaunting gas jet?, 
 flaring from coster's stall or sordid shop-front; and for 
 the song and call of birds were substituted the discordant 
 sounds produced by men and motors. Gale heard and 
 saw, yet neither saw nor heard ; ears and eyes directed his 
 course, but the crowds around him were as a moving soli- 
 tude, the sounds that cut the air as a surging silence. He 
 was not really in the streets, though the space and the free- 
 dom of them were a comfort to his consciousness ; he was, as 
 happens in a dream, seemingly in two places at a time, yet 
 actually in neither of them. 
 
 The two places in which Gale's spirit stood were the 
 operating theatre at St. Anne's and John Cameron's sitting- 
 room. Only the evening before he had paid Cameron a 
 visit, and words that had been spoken during the visit were 
 saying themselves to him now. Gale had held forth on a 
 subject on which his sentiments and convictions were not 
 at one, and, speaking on the side of his convictions, he had 
 plumed himself on his logic, and reassured himself by its 
 force. Experiments on living animals, he had asserted, were 
 a necessity, if only to avoid the temptation, if animals were
 
 46 PRIESTS OF. PROGRESS 
 
 not available for demonstrative and experimental purposes, 
 of experimenting and demonstrating by means of human, 
 subjects. The argument had been suggested to him by a 
 conversation with a man whom he much admired, and 
 seemed to him irrefutably and comfortably sound. 
 
 Cameron's only answer had been questions. "If that is 
 so," he had asked, "how is it that in England, where some 
 restriction is placed on vivisection, there is less experiment- 
 ing upon human beings than in any other country ? How is 
 it that in Vienna, where it is triumphant, women in the 
 hospitals, pregnant women, and babies, new-born and un- 
 born, form subjects for experiment? How is it that in 
 America, the champion land of freedom and progress, ex- 
 periments are performed on the inmates of the hospitals, 
 the asylums and the prisons, and accounts of them pub- 
 lished in the medical press?" 
 
 Gale's reply had been to disclaim the accuracy of that 
 which he could not justify, and Cameron had replied by 
 giving him certain references and telling him to verify 
 them for himself. He had not had time to look up the 
 references yet; but there was present to his vision a scene 
 more potent in effect than any printed record. He had 
 seen, with his own eyes, that the operations which in- 
 structed hospital students were not always for the benefit 
 of the patient; and things about which he had been tri- 
 umphantly certain only yesterday, seemed doubtful and ob- 
 scure now, as, in the solitude of his own thoughts, he 
 rambled from street to street.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE dreams with which Miss Lowther had inspired 
 both Cranley-Chance and Sidney Gale were destined 
 to remain, at least for some time to come, but dreams. 
 For David's fireside meditation after her first meeting with 
 Chance produced a very definite effect on her course of 
 conduct. 
 
 On the afternoon following that meditation, she took an 
 omnibus to St. John's Wood and called on her mother's 
 friend, Miss Barker. It was a Friday, and on Friday, as 
 David well knew, Miss Barker balanced her books. She 
 glanced at her watch as she passed through the little garden 
 which fronted Miss Barker's house. "She'll have finished 
 the adding up," she said to herself, as she rang the bell, 
 "so it's all right." 
 
 A few minutes later there was a knock at the door of 
 Miss Barker's sitting-room. 
 
 "Come in !" she said, a touch of impatience in her voice; 
 for never, she was thinking, could she gel those books done 
 without interruption. 
 
 The door opened just wide enough to admit David's 
 head, which was the only part of her that entered. 
 
 "Doggie dear," she said, "will you bite if I come in?" 
 
 When it had first occurred to the child of five to call her 
 mother's friend Doggie because her name was Barker, the 
 idea had convulsed her with merriment and delight. The 
 merriment had passed with time, but the name had stuck; 
 
 47
 
 48 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Miss Barker, for some reason or other, WAS pleased with it ; 
 and David, who used it often on ordinary occasions, in- 
 variably did so when deprecation or coaxing seemed neces- 
 sary. 
 
 "I feel like biting, for you are my third interruption. 
 Come in, of course, for I know you won't stay out. But you 
 must take a book and sit quite quiet here till I've finished." 
 
 David entered, made a great show of closing the door 
 softly, and crossed the room on tip-toe. She did not take a 
 book, but sat down before the fire and folded her hands ; the 
 atmosphere of the room seemed charged with the fact that 
 she was keeping wonderfully still. 
 
 Miss Barker glanced towards her and half smiled; but 
 she was used to David and her ways, and, without taking 
 any more notice of her guest, went on with the figures. 
 
 For a quarter of an hour there was silence in the room. 
 At the end of that time David had forgotten what she was 
 playing at and had fallen into genuine reflection; Miss 
 Barker had finished her accounts. 
 
 "I've done now," said the hostess. 
 
 "I hope I haven't disturbed you. I have been quiet, 
 haven't I ?" 
 
 "Almost obtrusively so, and quite unnecessarily. Why 
 didn't you go to the drawing-room? Mrs. Greener and 
 her daughter are there. You could have talked to them." 
 
 "I didn't want to; I didn't want to talk to anybody but 
 you." 
 
 "I shall have to go and pour out tea soon." 
 
 "I know. That's why I came early." 
 
 "Well, what is it?" 
 
 "I wish you'd sit down comfortably. I want your 
 advice." 
 
 Miss Barker was a wide woman, broad and squat in fig-
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 49 
 
 ure, and with a large head. Her features were well cut, but 
 were too strongly marked for beauty; her hair, eyebrows, 
 and eyelashes were mouse-coloured; the eyes themselves 
 were pale blue. She looked the sort of woman whom Mrs. 
 Lowther would never have chosen for a friend and who 
 would never have made a friend of Mrs. Lowther; never- 
 theless the two women had been close friends for more years 
 than David had existed; to David Miss Barker seemed an 
 integral part of life. 
 
 She sat down now on a low chair, her legs rather far 
 apart; her eyes were attentive. 
 
 "Well, go on, child! We haven't much more than a 
 quarter of an hour." 
 
 "I'm going to beard father," said David. 
 
 "Ah!" 
 
 "This morning I burned all my sketches." 
 
 "As a parallel to Caesar's boats?" 
 
 "Don't be sarcastic, Doggie, please! It's so unkind." 
 
 Miss Barker's answer was to pat the girl's hand. 
 
 "I burned them because I was disgusted with them, be- 
 cause I know they're all wrong; and I never can get them 
 right unless I'm taught." David paused an instant. "I've 
 determined that I will be taught ; and I want you to help 
 me." 
 
 "With your father?" Miss Barker spoke quickly. 
 
 "No. I'll tell you. You have a friend, a Mrs. 
 Home " 
 
 "But she lives in France." 
 
 " who knows a lot of artists." 
 
 "But, my dear child, she lives at Lapelli^re." 
 
 "I know, but unless I get right away I ghall never do 
 any good." 
 
 "But Bertha but you can't leave your mother, David."
 
 50 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "That's where I want your help. I'm afraid mother will 
 mind." 
 
 "Mind? Of course she'll mind." Miss Barker's tone 
 was indignant. "You're the only thing she's got. If youth 
 were not completely selfish, you'd mind." 
 
 "I do, but " 
 
 "Don't you see how lonely her life is? how " Miss 
 
 Barker got up from her chair and stood by the fireplace. 
 "I don't think it matters a bit whether you learn to 
 paint more or less well compared with my poor Bertha's 
 loneliness." 
 
 "Anr 1 you talk about youth being selfish," said David. 
 
 "You see what phe is." 
 
 "Yes." David, too, got up. "That's just it. I do see. 
 It's partly why I want to get away. I want to be myself 
 and develop on my own lines. If I stay at home, never 
 doing what I want to do " 
 
 "It seems to me you have your own way in most things." 
 
 "Only in little things that don't matter. If I stay at 
 home I might get like her ; and I I think if s dreadful." 
 
 For a quarter of a minute there was silence; then, "You 
 will probably marry," Miss Barker said. 
 
 "Mother's married. I don't see that that's much good. 
 Suppose I married a squashing sort of man like father?" 
 
 "There would probably be ructions," said Miss Barker. 
 
 "I don't know. There aren't ructions between father 
 and mother, nor between father and me. Thaf s because 
 we submit. But I don't want to be always submitting, and 
 I believe that if you don't develop your will-power and 
 and initiative before you marry, you're done for." 
 
 "You're arguing from a single case, my dear." 
 
 "I'm arguing from what I know, and that's the only 
 thing anybody can argue from. Not that I blame father;
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 51 
 
 I don't; I admire him. I admire all people who are strong 
 and clever and get on. Only I want to get on too ; I don't 
 want to have all the life crushed out of me." 
 
 "Grapes are crushed before you get the wine; and your 
 mother is very sweet." 
 
 "So is lavender that you put away amongst the linen. 
 Oh, I'm horrid, I know, and I'm saying horrid things ; but 
 it's been a sort of nightmare. Mother upeet me last night, 
 too. I used to think she was born like that; subdued and 
 giving in, and always knitting it seemed to me she must 
 have knitted in her cradle. But something she said last 
 night made me think she had been different once ; and then 
 it came over me, like a nightmare, as I said, that if I didn't 
 strike out while I was young and strong I might drift into 
 the same sort of state." 
 
 "Tea is ready, miss," said a maid at the door. 
 
 "Come along," said Miss Barker. "We must not keep 
 them waiting." 
 
 "Besides," David continued, "if you can't help yourself, 
 you can't help anybody else." 
 
 "For the moment, my dear, you can help me with the 
 tea. Come along!" 
 
 When David went away Miss Barker accompanied her 
 to the door. 
 
 "There's something in what you say," she said. "Tell 
 your mother I will come and see her on Sunday afternoon." 
 
 "You'll help me?" 
 
 "I'll yes, to a certain extent, at any rate, I'll help you. 
 I'll talk the thing over." 
 
 David went away satisfied. Doggie was always better 
 than her word. 
 
 When she reached home she found her mother looking out 
 of the window,
 
 52 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "I was watching for you," said Mrs. Lowther. "I hoped 
 you would have been back for tea." 
 
 "I've been to see Doggie." 
 
 "I wish you'd told me you were going. How is she?" 
 
 "She snapped and growled a bit, but she seemed quite 
 well. And I was to tell you that she's coming to see you 
 on Sunday." 
 
 Mrs. Lowther's face brightened. "I'm very glad." 
 
 On Sundays Dr. Lowther visited his friends, or received 
 them in his study downstairs, and his wife could count on 
 having the drawing-room to herself. She usually had it 
 altogether to herself, for callers, never very plentiful in 
 Harley Street, were especially rare on Sundays. But the 
 following Sunday proved an exception to the rule, for be- 
 fore Miss Barker arrived, Professor Chance was announced. 
 
 The visit disconcerted Mrs. Lowther; always awkward 
 with strangers, she was peculiarly ill at ease with her hus- 
 band's friends, and she wished ardently that she had told 
 the parlour-maid to admit no one but Miss Barker. It had 
 seemed an unnecessary precaution when no one but Miss 
 Barker ever came. To be sure she could have obtained re- 
 lief by sending for David, since David, she knew, was up- 
 stairs in her own room; but she had her reasons for not 
 wishing her daughter to appear, and, clenching her mental 
 teeth, she set herself to utter every platitude she could 
 think of about the weather. That Professor Chance should 
 think her dull in no wise disturbed her ; she had no desire to 
 pose as an entertaining hostess, and the duller he found 
 her the sooner, probably, he would go. 
 
 But Chance, in asking for Mrs. Lowther instead of the 
 doctor, had other views than to talk to an uninteresting 
 woman about the weather, and presently inquired whether 
 Miss Lowther was at home. Mrs. Lowther hesitated, but
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 53 
 
 she was a bad liar, and admitted confusedly that David 
 was upstairs. The visitor would so much like to see her; 
 when he had met her at a Private View lately, she had 
 expressed opinions about certain of the pictures, and he 
 had brought a cutting from the Academy which supported 
 those opinions to a remarkable degree. He did not know 
 whether Miss Lowther usually saw the Academy? Again 
 was Mrs. Lowther tempted to a falsehood, longing to de- 
 clare boldly that David read the Academy regularly; and 
 again timidity betrayed her into telling the truth. 
 
 No, it was a paper her daughter did not see, and yes, 
 certainly, if Professor Chance wished it, she would send for 
 her. 
 
 She rose and rang the bell; another woman would have 
 asked Chance to ring it, but Mrs. Lowther never asked any- 
 body to do anything ; and presently, in answer to her mes- 
 sage, David entered the room. 
 
 She was genuinely interested in the cutting from the 
 Academy; it was flattering to have one's opinions echoed 
 by a real critic for to David everybody who wrote a 
 printed notice was a real critic ; and she chatted away to the 
 professor with an utter absence of the embarrassment to 
 which her mother was a prey. 
 
 After a little while Miss Barker appeared; and instead 
 of going, the professor stayed on ; for while the new guest 
 talked to the mother, it was possible to enjoy a tete-ci-tete 
 with the daughter ; and the addition to the party suited him 
 exactly. It was David who sent him away at last. She 
 was going out to tea, and had no intention of breaking her 
 engagement for the sake of talking to Chance, even though 
 he was that to her most wonderful combination, a scien- 
 tific man who was interested in art. He actually had a col- 
 lection of Dutch pictures, and he was anxious for her opin-
 
 54 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 ion on its merits; which was both strange and delightful. 
 Nevertheless, though he wore well-polished boots, and, the 
 day being sunny, a fancy waistcoat, he belonged to the 
 category of "father's friends," and could therefore possess 
 no real interest for the inhabitant of a world in which old 
 age began at thirty-five. Accordingly, when the hands of 
 the clock pointed to a quarter past four, David rose, and 
 with an easy directness which was characteristic of her, said 
 that she had an engagement which obliged her to go out, 
 and that she hoped Professor Chance would excuse her. 
 
 The professor was somewhat put out, for he had been 
 congratulating himself on making a good impression; but 
 he begged Miss Lowther, with a bow and a smile, not to 
 run the risk of being late, said he also had an engagement 
 and ought to have been off long ago, opened the door for 
 her exit, and took a prompt farewell of Mrs. Lowther.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 WHEN the two women were left alone Mrs. Lowther 
 - heaved a sigh of relief. 
 
 "I'm so glad he's gone," she said. 
 
 "So am I," answered Miss Barker, "for I want to talk to 
 you, and it's talk that requires us to be quite alone." 
 
 Miss Barker, on reflection, had arrived at the conclusion 
 that there was much to be said in favour of David's leaving 
 home for a time, and had come prepared to espouse her 
 cause from conviction as well as loyalty ; yet, as she looked 
 at the pale timid little woman beside her, the arguments 
 which had seemed so potent in the seclusion of her room at 
 Maida Hill seemed to melt away in favour of David re- 
 maining with the mother who idolised and depended on her. 
 Still, the thing had to be done, and Miss Barker did it as 
 best she could, broaching the subject from the aspect of the 
 girl's inborn needs and decided talent, an aspect which she 
 knew would appeal both to Bertha's maternal pride and her 
 unselfishness. 
 
 She was prepared for tears, for demur, for to begin 
 with, perhaps unqualified refusal to consider the plan; a 
 painful scene would certainly be the prelude to David 
 getting her way; for that she would get it, as far as her 
 mother was concerned, Miss Barker never doubted. She 
 was therefore amazed and relieved in about equal propor- 
 tion, when Mrs. Lowther pronounced herself, almost eager- 
 ly, in favour of David's departure. 
 
 55
 
 56 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "She must go, yes, she'd much better go," she said. 
 
 Miss Barker stared at her friend. 
 
 "Why, Bertha!" she exclaimed, "I'm astonished; I 
 thought you'd well, make a great fuss. I thought you'd 
 mind so terribly." 
 
 "I do mind, I shall mind." There was a choke in Mrs. 
 Lowther's utterance. "But but I'd much rather she 
 went than that she should marry Cranley-Chance." 
 
 "Who, pray, is Cranley-Chance? I never heard of him." 
 
 "The man who's just gone. He came to dinner, and this 
 is the third time he's called, though she was out the other 
 twice." 
 
 "A man might call," said Miss Barker slowly, "with- 
 out " She paused reflectively. 
 
 "He wouldn't come to see me, Bella, And, this being 
 Sunday, why didn't he ask for the doctor?" 
 
 "Perhaps he did, and he's out." 
 
 "No, he isn't; he's in. Besides, he Chance, I mean 
 met her at a Private View, and he brought a paper about 
 it to-day, and but it isn't only what I've told you. I know 
 he wants her. How can you think for a moment that I 
 shouldn't know?" 
 
 "A mother's prescience," said Miss Barker. She settled 
 herself in her chair, her legs, as usual, rather far apart; a 
 lover was much easier to deal with than Bertha's expected 
 distress. "Oh, I dare say you're right, Bertha. But why 
 shouldn't she marry him ? He seemed quite a nice man." 
 
 "He's like Bernard." 
 
 "You mean ?" 
 
 "Yes, I You see why I couldn't why I would 
 
 rather, even, that she should go away." 
 
 Miss Barker inclined her head slowly. "But David,"
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 57 
 
 she said, after an instant's pause, "may be different, may 
 take a different view." 
 
 "She does; at least, that is to say, she thinks she does. 
 But she doesn't know; it's only because, like so many, she 
 doesn't know. I wouldn't risk it I wouldn't risk putting 
 her in the position that I was in for for anything. I'd 
 rather, I say it truly, Bella, I'd rather never see her again." 
 
 Miss Barker was recalling David's words: "I might get 
 like her" ; but almost immediately she shook her head. 
 
 "Violet and you are altogether different; she would take 
 things differently. Look at the numbers of women, of 
 wives, who don't mind, who are happy and proud." 
 
 "If she were to realise as I realised But why do 
 
 you talk like that? Why should you argue against me " 
 
 "When I agree with you? Just to make you look at the 
 thing all round. Supposing David would like to marry 
 this man?" 
 
 "She doesn't. Isn't it proved by her wanting to go 
 away? But if she were to stay here " 
 
 "He must be a great deal older than she is." 
 
 "Oh, yes, he is five orlsix-and-forty." 
 
 "Men of that age, when they take a fancy to a young 
 girl, are very persistent." 
 
 "I know. And Bernard would probably like it. Bella, 
 you must get her away." 
 
 "What can I do? It rests with her father. Do you 
 suppose he'll object?" 
 
 "Sure to. And you know what he is." 
 
 "I know what he used to be," said Miss Barker, with a 
 certain grimness. "I haven't seen him to speak to at 
 any rate for a long time now." 
 
 David came home that evening in a tremor of excitement. 
 How had her mother taken it the very important "it" that
 
 58 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Miss Barker was to unfold to her? She stood with her 
 hand on the handle of the drawing-room door. She shrank 
 from the sight of suffering; she hated to give pain; and 
 yet to stay on at home, to give up all idea of independence, 
 
 all ambition; to sink perhaps She turned the handle 
 
 and went into the room. 
 
 Mrs. Lowther was sitting by the middle window, looking 
 out ; she did not knit on Sundays. She turned at once. 
 
 "Darling, come here! Doggie has told me, and I want 
 you to go." 
 
 "You want me to ?" Eelief and surprise were in David's 
 voice, and in her heart, yet she was conscious of a slight 
 disappointment. She had worked herself up to argue, to 
 plead, to console; and now, instead of opposition, of tears, 
 of the prayer "Don't leave me!" she was met with the al- 
 most eager permission, "I want you to go." Coming over 
 to her mother's chair, she found, in her astonishment, noth- 
 ing to say but "Why ?" 
 
 *' Because it will be best for you, best in every way." 
 
 "But I'm so afraid you'll miss me." 
 
 "Yes; but I won't think of it; I can bear it. I've been 
 sitting here thinking since Isabel went, and I can bear it, 
 I know." 
 
 "Mother," said David, "I'm a selfish brute, and I think 
 I won't go." 
 
 "You must go; I insist upon it." 
 
 Mrs. Lowther's cheeks were flushed; her eyes shone; 
 David had never seen her mother's face as it looked now; 
 something of the youth that had passed, of the beauty that 
 had died, seemed to revive in the animation which in- 
 formed it. 
 
 "But supposing father doesn't give his consent?"
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 59 
 
 "You're twenty-one, and you have your Aunt Emily's 
 fifty pounds a year." 
 
 "Mother!" 
 
 David could only gasp; meekness personified preaching 
 rebellion took her breath away. But, as she gasped, her 
 interest in her mother quickened, her sympathy waxed; 
 there was a possibility of comradeship between her and that 
 mother which she had never before even dreamed of as pos- 
 sible. She drew a footstool to Mrs. Lowther's side, and, 
 sitting thus, the two entered into a long discussion as to 
 how best to persuade the doctor to David's views. 
 
 The result of the discussion was that that evening David 
 entered her father's study while he was smoking the cigar 
 which finished his day. 
 
 "David! I thought you'd gone to bed. What do you 
 want?" 
 
 David was feeling uncomfortably nervous. Though 
 courageous, she was not the least bold, and while her will 
 was strong, her nature was far from aggressive. She was 
 determined to go to France, and she would be all right, she 
 told herself, as soon as she got well into the fray; it was the 
 opening of the campaign that was the difficulty. But when 
 she fired her first shot, she fired it straight. 
 
 "I've come to say that I want to leave home, father, for 
 a time." 
 
 She was standing by the round centre table with the 
 medical magazines and pamphlets on it; she put one hand 
 on the edge and pressed it hard. 
 
 Dr. Lowther took his cigar from his lips and held it 
 between his two fingers. "And why do you want to leave 
 home for a time?" 
 
 "I want to learn to paint; to learn really not to play 
 at it."
 
 60 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Lowther looked at her with the expression that, as David 
 put it to herself, made you feel yourself a fool, or convinced 
 you at any rate that, if you did not recognize the fact of 
 your folly, Lowther did. The expression nettled while it 
 abashed her ; her colour rose, and though the hand on the 
 table trembled slightly, her voice grew firmer. 
 
 "I know of a lady who lives at Lapelliere " 
 
 "Is that a centre of art?" 
 
 "A good many artists live there.'* 
 
 "You know my opinion of art and artists?" 
 
 "Yes; that's why I want to go away to study. It's 
 impossilbe to do it here." 
 
 Lowther smiled ; he was not displeased by the rejoinder. 
 David smiled too; if only father would give in without 
 making a fuss! 
 
 Father, however, had no idea of giving in. 
 
 "I consider that sort of study a pure waste of time. You 
 know I have always set my face against it." 
 
 "Yes, I know. But I thought" hesitatingly "that 
 perhaps you didn't realise I was in earnest." 
 
 "Oho !" The doctor laughed out. "What a young wom- 
 an calls being in earnest is not a very serious thing." 
 
 David came round the table and stood close to him. "It's 
 serious with me. I really mean to go." 
 
 "You've got very pretty hair, David," said the doctor. 
 "Ton my soul, I'm glad you're a nice-looking girl." 
 
 "Cajolery's no use," answered David, smiling but im- 
 patient. 
 
 "If you'd been ugly, Fd have said yes at once." 
 
 "Then I wish no, I don't. But please understand, 
 father, that I've made up my mind." 
 
 "You have? And what about mine? Go to bed, David,
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 61 
 
 go to bed ! And look here, when I go over to the Brussels 
 Conference, you shall go with me." 
 
 "But that isn't what I want." 
 
 "A medical man knows far better what a young girl 
 wants than she knows herself, my child. You've got a bit 
 hipped, and a little change will put you all right." 
 
 David drew a few paces away. "You won't understand; 
 you won't see that I mean to go?" 
 
 " Suppose that I do understand ; and suppose that I abso- 
 lutely refuse to consent to any such nonsense." 
 
 David continued to look at the doctor with her direct 
 gaze, but she spoke very low, and there was a falter in her 
 voice. "I have fifty pounds a year of my own," she said. 
 
 Lowther sat up straight. "You don't mean that you 
 intend to go without my consent ?" 
 
 "I shall have to if if you won't give it." 
 
 "If you do I'll cut you off with a shilling." 
 
 David paused; then, "I don't mind about the shilling," 
 she said, "but I couldn't bear you to cast me off." She 
 came and stood close to the doctor, who had risen and was 
 standing with his back to the mantelpiece. "Please let 
 me go without a fuss, father !" 
 
 "A fuss! a fuss indeed!" Lowther was frowning, but 
 David knew from the tone of his voice that she had won her 
 case. "What with anti-vivisection and anti-vaccination 
 and socialism and women's rights, all the decent people in 
 the country are at the mercy of prejudice and faddism. In 
 my day, a girl who dared to disagree with her father " 
 
 "But, father, I agree with you about everything except 
 learning to paint." 
 
 " would have been shut into her room and fed on bread 
 and water." 
 
 "I might just as well be at Lapelliere for all you'd see
 
 62 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 of me if I were," said David ; then, thinking it best to take 
 victory at the flood, she kissed her father quickly and fled. 
 
 Bernard Lowther, left alone, lit a fresh cigar. "She's a 
 baggage," he was thinking; "yet I like a woman with some 
 spirit in her. The idea of telling me she'd go whether I 
 agreed or not ! The cheek of it ! Well, she shall go ; she's 
 won the right to it. But what the devil shall I do without 
 her?" 
 
 Thus it came to pass that David Lowther went to 
 Lapelliere, and for some time to come figured in the lives 
 of Professor Chance and Sidney Gale only in the region 
 of dreams.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 SIDNEY GALE was beginning to wonder if he had been 
 wise in accepting Cameron's invitation to go and see 
 him: for while Cameron interested, he also disturbed him, 
 and he was half disposed to think that he would have fore- 
 gone the interest could he have got rid of the disturbance 
 too. Gale, casual and careless in many ways, and with a 
 reputation, won in his student days, for rowdiness, was 
 nevertheless ambitious for himself and reverent of his pro- 
 fession; in that region of his thoughts which remained 
 unexposed to the minds of his fellows, it was a profession 
 of high ideals and noble action ; while he spoke of its daily 
 tasks in medical slang and callous phrase, he was convinced 
 that those who followed it were alike the saviours and the 
 servants of humanity. 
 
 And Cameron had instilled into that fine-flavoured cup 
 of loyalty and admiration the poison drop of doubt. To 
 be sure, before he had known Cameron, difficulties had 
 arisen ; but difficulties which he had been able to overcome. 
 Foremost amongst these was the physical and as he told 
 himself sentimental shrinking from the demonstrations 
 which he could not avoid witnessing during his attendance 
 of an advanced course of physiology; his instincts had re- 
 volted, his humanity made protest against that which he 
 had been obliged to watch. And yet, in the very existence 
 of these instincts, in the very force of the protests, he had 
 found substance wherewith to feed his idealism. For it 
 
 68
 
 64. PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 was splendid, in spite of distaste to the task, in spite of a 
 quailing of the heart, in spite of the selfish rebellion of un- 
 reasoning emotion, splendid to constrain oneself to the 
 sacrifice of the lower and the' few for the sake of winning 
 salvation for the higher and the many. Sane, strong, and, 
 in the truest sense of the word, unselfish, were the epithets 
 which Gale applied to the doers of deeds which nauseated 
 him ; and those men of the unshrinking hand and seemingly 
 callous demeanour were set by him on a pedestal of respect. 
 
 And then came Cameron and threatened to dislodge them 
 from their exalted position ; not by direct onslaught, which 
 it would have been easy enough to combat, since Paget, in 
 his book, had demolished once and for all the false preten- 
 sions of the anti-vivisection brigade; but by questions and 
 suggestions which he could not always dispose of to his own 
 complete satisfaction. Could he have said that Cameron 
 was rabid, he would' have remained undisturbed; but 
 Cameron made no personal accusations, and the ideas which 
 he touched upon remained uncomfortably persistent in 
 Gale's mind. 
 
 These ideas were shaped into definite misgiving by the 
 operation on Sarah Jennings. Moreton Shand had a high 
 place in his profession; he sat in the seats of the mighty; 
 he was an oracle in the region of opinion, an adept in that 
 of skill. Such a man was above suspicion. And yet such 
 a man could act only from the highest motives. And yet 
 what the devil of a high motive could he have had in taking 
 away that woman's cheek bone? was the question in Gale's 
 mind ; and the only answer he could find was the obvious 
 one : the motive was the desire to instruct the students, to 
 stimulate their interest, by means of demonstration. Shand 
 was popular as a teacher ; flocks of admiring students fol- 
 lowed him from ward to ward ; his skill was spoken of with
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 65 
 
 enthusiasm. Gale had a logical mind, and his reflections 
 made him uncomfortable; more than uncomfortable; the 
 war of the concrete instance with the enthroned ideal pro- 
 duced in him positive unhappiness. The unhappiness mani- 
 fested itself outwardly by a more than usually casual man- 
 ner ; so much so, that Hall was moved to remonstrance. 
 
 "It's all very well, old man," he said, "but how the deuce 
 do you imagine you're going to get patients when you set 
 up on your own if you don't take things more seriously?" 
 
 "Sufficient unto the day," was Gale's answer. "Let a 
 man be natural while he may." 
 
 "If it's a man's nature to be an ass, the sooner he changes 
 it the better." 
 
 "Can the leopard change his spots?" 
 
 "He can mend his manners." 
 
 "Some men," observed Gale reflectively, "are born to 
 advise, and others have advice thrust upon them." 
 
 " Oh, of course, if you're going to take it like that," said 
 Hall, getting up. 
 
 Gale pushed him back into his chair. "I'll take it lying 
 down. Ton my soul, old chap, if you'll give me lessons in 
 deportment, I'll I'll practise in the wards. Besides, you 
 can't go, when Percy has asked you to tea. By the way, it's 
 most reprehensible of Percy. Ah, here he is! Percy, old 
 man, Hall's been criticising you; he says if a man's an ass, 
 he might at least mend his manners." 
 
 "Ass himself. What's Mother Deane done with the tea?" 
 
 "I should suggest inquiry. May I?" said Gale, pointing 
 to the bell. 
 
 "For goodness' sake, do!" 
 
 Gale vaulted the sofa and rang the bell. 
 
 "Take care," cried Percy, "you'll disturb old Cameron." 
 
 "Old fool," muttered Hall.
 
 66 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "In a world of fools, the small-brained man is king. Is 
 that why you're calling everybody but yourself an ass or 
 an idiot?" said Gale. 
 
 "Do you call yourself and old Cameron the world ?" 
 
 "Types of it; and jolly good types too. Hallelujah ! here 
 comes to tea !" 
 
 The lodging-house maid, commonly called "the actress," 
 because her name was Siddons, and whose only acquaint- 
 ance with tragedy was that engendered by the oft-repeated 
 connection, of her own small body with a very large tray, 
 appeared with teapot, toast, cake, and the various items 
 of a substantial tea. 
 
 "Jove ! her part's too heavy for her this time," said Gale, 
 and darting forward he took the tray from the trembling 
 arms. "What do you want to go and bring it all at once 
 for?" he asked. 
 
 "Syves a journey, sir," said Siddons, pleased, panting, 
 and confused. 
 
 "Shouldn't care to be cast in that play," said Gale, when 
 the girl had gone. "Act one, tray for breakfast; act two, 
 tray for lunch; intermezzo, washing-up; act three " 
 
 "Oh, talk sense!" cried Hall. 
 ; "Hall's not interested in Demos," said Burden. 
 
 "Except when he or she is lying on an operating table," 
 added Gale. 
 
 "I'm interested in the profession," said Hall stoutly, 
 "and it's a deuce of a pity you aren't too, as you've got to 
 get your living by it." 
 
 "Living's a poor thing, ain't it, Percy?" said Gale. 
 "What we two want is fame. Butter, Hall, please. Fame ! 
 that last infirmity of noble minds." He leant across the 
 table to Burden. "Give us your hand, old chap! Well 
 climb the heights together."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 67 
 
 "It's all very well," said Hall, half laughing and half 
 angry, "it's all very well to footle and gibe, but tell you 
 what it is, when I'm at the top of the tree, you'll be strug- 
 gling low down amongst the G.P.'s." 
 
 "Mark his words, Burdon, mark our Edgar's words." 
 
 "Unless you change." 
 
 "Unless I change." Gale put down a large round of 
 toast. His tone altered. "Unless I change ! I hope to God 
 I don't. If I do if I do, as likely as not when you're at 
 the top of your infernal tree, Hall, I shall be manure at the 
 roots." 
 
 "What the devil's come to him?" asked Hall. 
 
 "Sidney, old chap," said Burdon, "what's the matter?" 
 
 "Matter?" Gale made a grimace, gave a gulp, and re- 
 turned to his usual self. " Matter ? I dunno. Something 
 gone wrong with the works, I suppose. Give us some more 
 tea." 
 
 "What I think so absurd about chaps of our standing," 
 remarked Burdon, "is that we're always talking about 
 G.P.'s as if we were miles above 'em. Now ninety-nine men 
 out of a hundred begin in general practice and ninety-seven 
 or eight of 'em stop there. I don't see the good of talking 
 as if you were a full-blown specialist before you've started 
 at all." . 
 
 "Well, you never did, old chap," said Gale. "The modest 
 violet isn't in it with you for lowliness." 
 
 "What's the good? I always knew I was going to be a 
 G.P., so what was the use of swaggering?" 
 
 "Do I understand " began Gale. 
 
 "No, I don't mean you especially; everybody does it. 
 There's Hall, now, professes to look down " 
 
 "That's different," said Hall, "seeing that I don't mean 
 to begin that way."
 
 68 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "Not as a G.P.?" exclaimed Bur don and Gale together. 
 
 "Certainly not." 
 
 "Then ?" asked Gale. 
 
 "I shall wait on at the hospital." 
 
 "Oh, bottle-washing," said Burdon. 
 
 "Call it what you like." 
 
 "Well, I'd rather G.P. it than that," said Gale. 
 
 "I dare say; but I want to get on the staff." 
 
 "Of St. Anne's, do you mean?" 
 
 Hall nodded. "And I shall do private research work." 
 
 "Study animals instead of people," said Gale. "Well, 
 it's all very well, but it seems to me a man ought to have 
 a foundation, at any rate, of clinical experience, and I don't 
 see how you're to get it except in general practice." 
 
 "If you go in for the scientific side, you don't want 
 clinical experience." 
 
 "Well, I'm going to be doctor first," said Gale, getting 
 up, "and scientist after like our friend Percy. Any more 
 patients, old chap?" 
 
 "Oh, I haven't been doing badly. It's a piece of luck 
 for me, of course, Weston letting me have a room in his 
 house. You needn't turn out, you fellows, and you'll find 
 plenty of smoke in that jar; but I must be off." 
 
 "What it is to be launched !" said Gale. "No, I'll come 
 a bit of the way with you. What are you going to do, 
 Hall?" 
 
 "I've got to go too, but in a different direction. Don't 
 you two wait." 
 
 "Launched!" said Hall to himself, as a minute later he 
 went down the stairs alone. His lip curled. "Fancy calling 
 that launched!"
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 WHEN" Gale and Hall each received an invitation to 
 dine with Dr. and Mrs. Lowther, the one ac- 
 cepted with supreme delight, the other with intense satis- 
 faction. David was to have a sort of farewell party before 
 she went to France, and Percy had been told that he might 
 invite to it the two friends about whom he talked so much. 
 Gale's delight was tempered by the knowledge that David 
 was to vanish from the world of possible meetings almost 
 immediately after his secret hope of seeing her again had 
 been fulfilled; but the fulfilment still lay ahead, an event 
 towards which the days moved on golden feet; and after- 
 wards well, afterwards the deluge and the profession 1 
 
 Hall's satisfaction knew no such impediment. For him 
 the doctor's daughter was merely an unknown girl, and 
 the unknown, in the shape of a concrete young woman, 
 possessed for him none of that mystery, intangible and 
 touched with reverence, with which young manhood of a 
 more romantic temperament is disposed to invest it. His 
 anticipations were entirely concerned with his prospective 
 host, whom he much admired and had long wanted to 
 know, but who was as far removed from him in sphere as 
 is the flying moth from the earth-bound caterpillar. And 
 now, merely from the fact of being friends with the moth's 
 nephew, the caterpillar was to be placed on a bush where 
 the moth could conveniently accost him. 
 
 There is perhaps no profession in which hero-worship 
 
 69
 
 70 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 is greater and esprit de corps stronger than in the medical. 
 The men at the top of the tree are, to the hospital student 
 and budding practitioner, as the lights in the firmament; 
 and the noted surgeon in particular commands their ad- 
 miration and allegiance. Later on, when experience, hard 
 work, and perhaps vicissitude, have increased the points 
 of view, as well as intensified the sight, of those who, from 
 making merry at the base of the trunk, have become toilers 
 on the lower branches, the element of hero-worship lessens 
 or disappears; especially if the toiler be ambitious, and 
 seek to rise, for then he finds that he cannot always climb, 
 but must constantly storm the heights. Yet the loyalty 
 continues: an unthinking loyalty for the most part; one 
 whose chief supports are prejudice, habit, and, perhaps, 
 something of the subserviency which those who walk year 
 after year in the rank and file are apt to develop towards 
 their leaders: but it is there, a weakness as well as a 
 strength, forbidding criticism, while supporting authority. 
 
 In youth, that which afterwards becomes hide-bound is 
 alive with the generous enthusiasm with which youth gilds 
 approval; and Edgar Hall, by nature neither enthusiast 
 nor hero-worshipper, was disposed at this time, by the 
 mere quality of youthfulness, to invest with a halo the 
 men who had achieved something of that which he him- 
 self designed to accomplish. 
 
 Lowther, from the professional point of view, had 
 achieved much. He had not, perhaps, added to the sum 
 of abiding knowledge, had not, in his researches, pene- 
 trated to, or even stumbled across, any of the laws of being : 
 but he had demonstrated certain facts; and whether those 
 facts were vitalised by connection with fundamental truths, 
 or belonged to that surface region divided between the mis- 
 leading and the obvious, was not inquired by his peers, his
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 71 
 
 profession, or the public. The demonstrations were pro- 
 nounced brilliant, and by their means he had reached the 
 Mecca of medicine and become an F.K.S. That to reach 
 his Mecca he had crossed a desert of pain and death, the 
 pain of the defenceless, the death of the dumb, was one 
 of the necessities of attainment, and caused no lessening 
 of his elation. He had taken for his motto that axiom 
 which is at once the reproach of casuistry and the glory 
 of experimental medicine, the assertion that the end justi- 
 fies the means; and while he would have found difficulty 
 in applying it in the case of the starving man who steals 
 bread for his children, he found none when knowledge and 
 not bread was the end in view, cruelty and not theft the 
 means. 
 
 It was with the P.R.S. that Hall on the night of the 
 dinner party the night, as Gale in his own mind called 
 it shook hands, and not, as was the case with his com- 
 panion, with Miss Lowther's father. This same father, 
 sanctified to Gale by proximity to the rose, was to Hall 
 the rose itself; and he had come determined to sniff up 
 as much of its scent as tact and the capacity of his nostrils 
 would allow. 
 
 Gale, in his dreams, had never permitted himself to 
 imagine that he would have the felicity of taking Miss 
 Lowther down to dinner, and was therefore overwhelmed 
 with confused delight when the doctor said casually, "Will 
 you take my daughter, Mr. Gale?" 
 
 Cranley-Chance, whom the doctor had elected to invite, 
 and whose penalty for being the oldest and the only im- 
 portant guest was to take down Mrs. Lowther a penalty 
 mitigated by the reflection that after reaching the dining- 
 room he need not talk to her looked across at Gale as the 
 words were spoken, and the eyes of the two men met.
 
 72 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 There is a certain antagonistic freemasonry between men 
 who admire the same woman; their identity of aim is re- 
 vealed or betrayed, rather in language wordless but un- 
 mistakable. Dogs, concerned with the question of suprem- 
 acy, growl when they meet : men do not growl aloud ; but 
 a wireless telegraphy conveys the defiance of each to the 
 other. The momentary glance which passed between Chance 
 and Gale showed them to each other as rivals, and with the 
 rivalry was born, on the part of Chance, enmity, on that of 
 Gale, distrust. To Chance, Gale was a whipper-snapper, 
 dangerous because of the youth which he scorned ; to Gale, 
 Chance was a man whose age, appropriate to fame, unfitted 
 him for love. 
 
 For the moment, in the silent contest, Gale was the 
 victor, but he descended the stairs with David's hand upon 
 his arm, less proud of his victory than diffident of his good 
 fortune. 
 
 Yet, though diffident, it was of his nature, since good 
 fortune had been given him, to make the most of it, and 
 he resolved that shyness should not rob him of the precious 
 hour that was his. He plunged straight into the subject 
 of which Miss Lowther had spoken at their first meeting. 
 
 "And so," he said, when David, after a word or two to 
 her right-hand neighbour, turned towards him, "you are 
 going to be an artist, after all !" 
 
 "I'm going to study painting, which isn't quite the 
 same thing." 
 
 "No, but the mere fact of getting your way about 
 studying shows that the artistic instinct must be over- 
 whelmingly strong in you." 
 
 "Or that I have a faculty for getting my own way. 
 That really is why I'm so pleased at going; it shows me I 
 must have some force of will."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS ?3 
 
 "Did you doubt it?" 
 
 "Horribly ; and to have a weak will is, I think, the most 
 dreadful thing that can happen to you ; especially if you're 
 a woman." 
 
 "I should have thought it was worse if you were a man." 
 
 "Oh, no, because men are not so apt to be sat on." 
 
 "But they are supposed to stand by themselves." 
 
 "I should think it is not very difficult to stand by 
 yourself, if you have not authoritative male relations who 
 push you down into a seat always a back one." 
 
 "There are other forces in the world besides male rela- 
 tions, you see." 
 
 "Oh, but you can fight them. Men are always sup- 
 posed to fight the world; it's considered to be to their 
 credit. But to fight a husband or a father " 
 
 David looked up at Gale with a face of amused inquiry. 
 Cranley- Chance, watching from his corner of the table, 
 caught the look and Gale's answering one of friendly un- 
 derstanding, and in his annoyance at being placed in a 
 position in which competition was impossible, made a 
 movement with his foot, and brought it down with some 
 force on that of his hostess. 
 
 An irrepressible "Oh!" from Mrs. Lowther caused him 
 to turn to her with a perfunctory, "I hope I didn't " 
 
 "Oh, not at all; it was only my foot. It doesn't 
 matter." 
 
 "I'm so sorry," declared Chance ; but to himself he said, 
 "Confound the woman ! "What does she want to go putting 
 her feet all over the place for?" 
 
 It seemed to him that the dinner was very long; the 
 girl "on his other side" he found uninteresting; and in 
 this gathering of youths and maidens, who said and laughed 
 at the silliest things, and enjoyed themselves without dis-
 
 74 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 crimination, his fame and achievements seemed assets of 
 no value. 
 
 It was better, to be sure, when the ladies left the 
 dining-room ; then, if he himself could not talk to Lowther's 
 daughter, no more, at any rate, could the whipper-snapper ; 
 and, moreover, Hall, detaching himself from his con- 
 temporaries, took a chair close to Chance and his host, 
 and, obviously worshipping at their joint shrine, some- 
 what soothed the wounds of unappreciated merit. 
 
 The professor entered the drawing-room, therefore, on 
 better terms with himself, if not with his rival; and here 
 triumph awaited him; for, going first into the room, he 
 at once appropriated an empty chair by David's side, and 
 succeeded in maintaining his position for a good half hour. 
 
 David at first cast somewhat wistful glances at the friv- 
 olous group of her contemporaries who were laughing and 
 chatting further up the room ; but there are few women to 
 whom homage is unwelcome, and Chance's homage was 
 conveyed in patent form. She was flattered, too, that a 
 man so noted should take, pains to talk to and amuse her ; 
 and belonging, as she did, to those women who are touched 
 as well as pleased by homage, ended by giving him in 
 return her full attention. 
 
 Gale, whose turn it now was to behold from afar the 
 glory of his rival, gazed on that glory with eyes made 
 humble by the consciousness of his own deficiencies; he, 
 too, withdrew from the central group, but with no design 
 of interrupting Chance's conversation. For that silent 
 little lady in the grey silk gown, his hostess and the mother 
 of the rose, was sitting all alone; and because she was 
 small and timid-looking, as well as because David was her 
 daughter, she made appeal to him, and he took a seat 
 beside her.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 75 
 
 Mrs. Lowther was considered difficult to talk to, but 
 hers was an unresponsiveness which did not disconcert or 
 discourage her guest; instinctively he divined its source, 
 and having no shyness with the shy, talked on in what was 
 almost a monologue, till the little self-contained woman 
 was sufficiently at her ease to make him some reply. By 
 that monologue and the duologue which followed it for 
 Mrs. Lowther, far more to her own surprise than to that of 
 Gale, did, after a time, find herself carrying on a conversa- 
 tion with him he won for himself a friend, feeble indeed, 
 to all appearance, but of undeviating loyalty. From that 
 night onward Mrs. Lowther was his, at first ineffective, but 
 always staunch supporter. 
 
 With her daughter he had but a few words more before 
 the restless, splendid evening was at an end. In the move- 
 ment caused by the leave-taking of the first departing 
 guest, David and Gale found themselves side by side; and 
 for five minutes, while the doctor detained Cranley-Chance, 
 they stood in a half solitude. 
 
 "I suppose I shall not see you again before you go?" 
 Gale tried to make his voice indifferent. 
 
 David shook her head and laughed. "Oh, no." 
 
 "You go very soon ?" 
 
 "To-morrow. I wanted this party on my last night, 
 because I thought that mother would be well, upset." 
 
 "I see. I don't think you said how long you were going 
 for?" 
 
 "A year for certain. After that I shall see." 
 
 "A year !" 
 
 If she had said ten Gale's face could not have fallen 
 lower. David, as quick to perceive as he to reveal, could 
 not fail to notice his discomfiture, and was touched by 
 that which it implied, in the same way that she had been
 
 76 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 touched by Chance's admiration; in the same way and 
 no more. Gale, to her, was a young man who was rather 
 unusual to look at by reason of his long legs, his thick 
 hair, and the curiously ringed irises of his yellowy-brown 
 eyes ; who was sympathetic and friendly, a friend of Percy's, 
 and nice it was her own word to talk to. As a lover, 
 an accepted lover, that is to say, as a possible husband, she 
 did not for one moment view him, any more than she 
 conceived the professor in those characters: neither the 
 one nor the other bore any resemblance to the portrait of 
 the ideal man whom she had never yet met. 
 
 Nor, indeed, did Gale think of himself as either suitor 
 or husband. As he walked home, with the charm of her 
 presence still upon him, still making him glad; with the 
 things he had said and the words she had answered; the 
 things he might have said and had not at the time thought 
 of, whirling in a confused jumble through his uplifted 
 mind, his aspirations did not reach so far or so high as to 
 touch the idea of any return for that which he gave her. 
 For he gave her worship, and one does not expect a goddess 
 to sit by one's fireside. He asked no more as yet than to 
 kneel to her ; but he wanted to kneel in her very presence. 
 
 Space and time were very real barriers to Sidney Gale. 
 Lapelliere and a year at least! It might almost as well 
 have been the antipodes and eternity. Yet to-night the 
 last few enchanted hours were warm about him; and he 
 would not think of the frosty morrow. The morrow would 
 bring if not the deluge, at any rate the profession; and 
 the profession was splendid in aim, and act, and possi- 
 bilities. But to-night its splendours were pale : he did not 
 care to contemplate them as he walked to St. Anne's.
 
 CHAPTEE XI 
 
 IT was summer at Lapelliere, real, positive summer. 
 David, used to the tepid uncertainly of the north, 
 borne straight from the caprices of the English spring into 
 a southern May, was filled with wonder and delight by 
 the steadfast warmth and brightness. 
 
 Mrs. Home's house in England it would have been a 
 cottage, in France it was a villa stood a little way out 
 of the town, upon a low hill, which seemed lofty, because 
 it was the biggest, almost the only one, in the neighbour- 
 hood. The great gates in the high wall which ran past 
 the back of the house opened from a grassy lane into a 
 space of garden; a narrowing lane, for the Villa Kosalie 
 was the last of a series of campagnes which stretched out- 
 wards from the streets; and beyond it lay the open coun- 
 try. A flat country it is, of red earth; treeless; covered 
 in the summer with the creeping green of vines. From 
 Mrs. Home's garden David could see for miles around; to 
 the far line of the Cevennes on the right ; on and on over 
 the green level about and beyond the town to the left; 
 and in front, across a seven miles space, to the blue of 
 the Mediterranean. 
 
 She stood there, in this garden of vines and fruit trees 
 and flowering shrubs, on the morning after her arrival; 
 early, when it was still possible to stand out in the open, 
 and when the glare of the sun had not yet hardened the 
 lines of the landscape. It was wonderful; vivid, brilliant, 
 
 77
 
 78 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 glowing with light ; and she would learn to paint it ! She 
 would learn to paint, and she was free; far away from a 
 life of routine and coming home in time for things; of 
 doctors and professors and rising men; of science and ex- 
 periments and discoveries; of surreptitious painting in a 
 pretence studio ; of of knitting (the thought came shame- 
 facedly) and a subdued, half-plaintive atmosphere. 
 
 It is splendid to be young and splendid to be free, and 
 it is not often that youth and freedom come together. 
 No wonder David felt elated as she looked out over the 
 gleaming land; no wonder the coffee and rolls, eaten and 
 drunk under the vine-covered grillage that shaded the 
 lower windows of the house, seemed to her incomparably 
 superior to the eggs and bacon of Harley Street. 
 
 Mrs. Home was a woman whom temperament and cir- 
 cumstances had combined to render unconventional. A 
 widow, and childless, she had overworked herself and over- 
 strained her purse in the cause which, attracting at first her 
 attention, had ended by absorbing her interest; and she 
 had come to the Villa Eosalie to save money and to seek 
 health before returning to its service. She lived alone, 
 imcompanioned save by two sheep dogs and the passing 
 presence of a woman who came daily to cook and clean. 
 
 David, irked by the sameness of her London life, chaf- 
 ing against the chains of custom, and longing for change 
 and freedom, was intuitively and immediately aware of 
 her hostess's unconventional attitude; and, relieved now 
 from the one doubt that had hovered on the horizon of 
 emancipation, was prepared to throw herself heart and 
 soul into what she conceived to be the perfect delight of 
 an artist's life. That delight waned a little as novelty 
 passed, giving way to the monotonous sequence of quiet, 
 working days, to the discouragements and mortifications
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 79 
 
 of apprenticeship. For David found that she knew even 
 less than she had supposed, and she was obliged to begin 
 at the beginning. Becoming overalls were of no avail; 
 an artistic setting lent no impulse to correct drawing ; there 
 was nothing that added to her knowledge or increased her 
 skill, save hard work and concentrated attention. And 
 hard work, failure, and endeavour taught her humility; 
 the true humility which is not the mock self-abasement of 
 wounded vanity, but that childlike attitude in which alone 
 it is possible to enter the kingdoms of mind, soul, or spirit. 
 Working hard; living a simple untrammelled life, which, 
 while it was unvaried, was yet not wearisome, because its 
 monotonous flow ran with and not against the current of 
 her desires ; gladdened by the warm brilliancy of the south, 
 interested and eager, she gained some skill in the art which 
 she longed to master. Mastery she never attained to, since 
 talent and not genius was her portion; but some of the 
 artist's privileges were hers, and she was free to enter a 
 little way into that wondrous world which lies behind 
 the appearances of things. 
 
 The freedom of that country is the artist's birthright, 
 born with him in the inalienable attribute of temperament, 
 and raising him above the men of muffled ears and half- 
 veiled eyes, who see only the physical forms and hear only 
 the earthly voices. Those who worship at the shrine of 
 science have no such royal prerogative, since the scientist's 
 way is the way of the intgllect, and it is only the great 
 intellects which can discriminate truths from facts. But 
 the born artist, be he never so poor a painter, the poet in 
 soul, though his rhyme be faulty, nay, even though he be 
 inarticulate, has free entrance, if only to climb its lower 
 slopes, to that high mountain whose peak is in the radiance. 
 
 After a week or two of life at Lapelliere, London and
 
 80 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 all that belonged to it seemed very far away. Mrs. Home ; 
 the two dogs whose gaze was so wistful when she left the 
 villa without them, whose welcome was so warm on her 
 return; Madame Moule, an artist who lived further down 
 the Avenue; and Victorine, the peasant servant, seemed 
 to David the real beings in the world. All those people 
 who were paying calls and going out to tea beneath a 
 grey sky, became shadowy; even her father's ruling per- 
 sonality was dimmed, while her mother's grew in insignifi- 
 cance ; and Professor Cranley- Chance and Sidney Gale were 
 like the receding figures in a nearly forgotten dream. 
 
 David's absorption in the present was perhaps partly 
 due to the interest and admiration excited in her by her 
 hostess. Mrs. Home was unlike any woman she had hither- 
 to met, and her views of life, entirely different from those 
 to which David was accustomed, appealed to her first by 
 their novelty and then by what seemed to her their common 
 sense. Common sense was not the term which most people 
 would have applied to those views; Judy Home was looked 
 upon by the majority of her friends as, at the same time, 
 a rebel and a sentimentalist. Had Dr. Lowther known 
 more about her, it is probable that he would have refused 
 his grudging consent to David's plan ; but to Dr. Lowther 
 she was simply Miss Barker's friend, and Miss Barker, 
 being an old maid, could only have friends of the order 
 of the tabby cat. Such was the doctor's reasoning; and, 
 though he disliked Miss Barker, his ideas on the subject 
 of the middle-aged unmarried woman led him to the 
 assumption that a friend of hers would possess no views at 
 all save such as were either harmless or futile.
 
 CHAPTEE XII 
 
 MRS. HOME was not well. The sun was very hot, 
 Tip at the villa as well as down in the town; even 
 the grille, thickly overgrown with vines, which roofed in 
 the courtyard, shading the lower windows, did not avail 
 to thwart its strength; and the dark green blinds barely 
 sufficed to keep the glare out of the rooms. Mrs. Home 
 was not sure whether she was suffering from those pierc- 
 ing rays, from "a touch of the sun," or from what she 
 called "French smells," which, though no worse perhaps 
 than English ones, are nevertheless different from them. 
 At first she treated her discomfort lightly, but when it 
 developed into the restlessness of fever, she announced to 
 David that she thought she would perhaps do well to 
 summon her antagonistic friend, Dr. Bellargue. 
 
 David encouraged her in the idea; she was feeling a 
 little anxious; but all she said was, "Do. I should like 
 to see a living paradox." 
 
 "He is kind, but benighted," said Mrs. Home, "kind, 
 that is to say, to me." 
 
 "I don't know that it sounds satisfactory. I should 
 have the best man in the place." 
 
 "He is the leading man in the place, and the cleverest." 
 
 "But you said he was benighted." 
 
 "The heads of long-established institutions generally 
 are benighted ; they get swamped in excrescences which they 
 mistake for development. However, my temperature being 
 
 81
 
 82 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 over a hundred and one, I think I had better have a pre- 
 scription, and I can't get one without a doctor to write it." 
 
 So Victorine was sent to the other end of the Avenue, 
 as the road leading to the villa was called, to summon Mon- 
 sieur Bellargue. He came the same afternoon ; a short man, 
 of brisk intelligence, and with that air of confidence in 
 himself and his methods which is so reassuring to most 
 patients. Judith Home, however, was unlike most patients, 
 and requested information as to the ingredients in the 
 draught which he purposed to give her. 
 
 "The ingredients are my business," said the doctor. 
 
 "Fully as much mine, as I am the person who is going 
 to take them." 
 
 "Your part is to follow out my directions." 
 
 "Not if your directions comprise the swallowing of some 
 poisonous animal extract which I object to introduce into 
 my system." 
 
 "All medicines are poison in a certain sense." 
 
 "But all poisons are not medicines in any sense." 
 
 "Why do you consult me, Madame ?" 
 
 "Because I trust your natural intelligence while I dis- 
 trust your acquired prejudices." 
 
 The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "As to preju- 
 dices !" 
 
 Nevertheless Mrs. Home got her way; Bellargue en- 
 lightened her as to the component parts of his prescrip- 
 tion; she agreed to take the medicine, and doctor and 
 patient parted friends. 
 
 "I think he must be a kind man," said David later on, 
 "because he patted Wuppums as he went out. Rough 
 backed away from him." 
 
 "Oh, he's fond of dogs in his own way which is a 
 hateful one."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 83 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "He likes them for his own sake, because they amuse 
 him ; not in the least for theirs." 
 
 "I suppose," said David, after a moment's reflection, 
 "that most people like animals in that way, more or less." 
 
 "More; most people behave to animals without any 
 sense of responsibility or duty or justice; as things, not 
 beings ; things to be petted or tortured, as best suits their 
 own convenience or profit." 
 
 "Oh, no! There are few people who would hurt an 
 animal willingly." 
 
 "But the majority will allow them to be hurt, and lift 
 no finger, stir no step to help them. I despise the people 
 who let things go on, who turn a deaf ear to the cries of 
 the world, blind eyes to its agonies, as much as I hate 
 those who cause the tortures and the groans." 
 
 "The doctor said," observed David tentatively, "that 
 you were to be kept quiet." 
 
 "If I were a man and you were a boy, I should say 
 
 Never mind. But it's a pity, for doctor is a word that lends 
 itself so admirably to alliterative cursing. As for quiet 
 what is quiet? Are you more likely to get it by bottling 
 up your feelings, or by letting off some of the steam ? Yet 
 I don't know," Judith said, with a suddenly reflective air 
 with which David was already familiar. "I don't know 
 that it's wise to let off much steam. Steam is a motive 
 power, and if one lets it all evaporate in words, one ends 
 by becoming an impotent wind-bag." 
 
 David laughed. "You don't show much sign of im- 
 potence at present." 
 
 But Judith was pursuing her own train of thought. She 
 was silent a minute, then, "I'm not like my friend, Annie 
 West," she said. "I have not arrived at being tolerant of
 
 84 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 all sinners and intolerant of all sin. On the contrary, 
 there is a great deal of sin towards which I feel more than 
 tolerant sympathetic almost, and there are sinners whom 
 I fiercely hate. I hate, for instance no, I despise, which 
 is a more subtle and therefore more dangerous form of 
 hatred I hate, in the form of contempt, the indifferent, 
 the supine, those who, as I said just now, do nothing to 
 remove the evils which they know to exist. I hate, but in 
 a much less degree because they are so ignorant and so 
 stupid the merely brutal. I hate most of all those who 
 link sentiment with cruelty, who, sailing under the flag of 
 noble motive, are, in reality, the pirates of humanity, ad- 
 dressing themselves only to the most selfish and cowardly 
 side of it, debasing it by an appeal to the welfare of the 
 body only. The sins of the flesh!" said Judith, turning 
 her eyes from the square of paling sky, which showed 
 through the window, to David's face, "I tell you they are 
 nothing to the sins of the spirit, the calculating sins, when 
 a man says to himself that by a dastardly act he may achieve 
 a certain result, by a cruel deed he may gain certain ends." 
 Suddenly Judith's expression changed. "I forgot," she 
 said, "I was so carried away, as I always am when I think 
 of these things, I was so carried away that I forgot that 
 your father is amongst the men I I don't love. But I 
 can't take back my words. For the disreputable, the outcast, 
 the vicious, even, I have toleration, compassion, yes, a sort 
 of sympathy ; but my very soul shrinks from that most re- 
 spectable, respected, and eminent body of men, the vivi- 
 sectionists." 
 
 The blood rushed to David's face. "I you " she 
 
 began, then rose up. "You're ill," she said, "and so we 
 can't it's impossible to discuss things. I'm going outside." 
 
 Outside she went, through the little courtyard, where
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 85 
 
 the vine leaves made an early twilight; through the gate- 
 way into the garden; and up to the higher ground where 
 sight had play over many miles of the softened landscape, 
 at rest after the glow and fever of the day. 
 
 For some minutes she stood and looked, seeing nothing 
 save the width of its expanse, tingling through all her 
 being with the revulsion of feeling created by Mrs. Home's 
 last words. For, until those final sentences, David had 
 been in full accord with her; in the abstract, all that 
 Judith had said had found impulsive echo in her young, 
 eager heart; as she listened, she had felt within herself a 
 horror and a hatred of all that was mean and cowardly 
 and cruel. And then, when suddenly it had become clear 
 to her against whom Judith's attack was mainly directed, 
 who were the men whom she held in detestation, the shock 
 that had resulted from the impact of abstract right with 
 accepted formula? had plunged her into a state of distressed 
 confusion, in which indignation and pain sought for the 
 uppermost place. She clung to the indignation, because 
 to be angry with Mrs. Home was a sort of salve to the pain 
 and doubt which underlay it. Father! who, if not her 
 ideal of what a man might be, was still her hero in the world 
 of men as she knew them ! Father ! to be classed amongst 
 the what was it that accusing voice had said? the 
 pirates of humanity! Father, who would not she 
 had so often heard him say it who would not even hurt a 
 fly, to be denounced as cruel ! Oh, it was shameful of Mrs. 
 Home, shameful! She did not, she could not, know the 
 men of whom she spoke; she 
 
 A gleam of joy, of triumph and consolation darted into 
 David's troubled mind. Of course Mrs. Home did not 
 know what she was talking about. Had David not often 
 heard her father declaim against the people who wrote, who
 
 86 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 preached, who agitated, in ignorance, in blindness and 
 prejudice, against the splendid work of self-sacrificing 
 scientists? Mrs. Home belonged, it appeared, she must 
 belong, to that body of the feebly sentimental, the falsely 
 humanitarian, whom David from her youth up had been 
 taught to despise. In the doctor's household anti-vivisec- 
 tionist was a term of contemptuous reproach ; every member 
 of it 
 
 Stop ! What was it that had been said, that evening 
 at the dinner-table, the first time she had ever seen Cranley- 
 Chance ? She had been far away, dreaming, and had waked 
 up just in time. What was it her mother had said? Oh, 
 yes, about the serums. And what had she meant by saying 
 it? To David it had never occurred till now to go below 
 the fact that, for some unaccountable reason, Mrs. Lowther 
 had audibly differed from the doctor. But now! What 
 
 was the reason that had made her mother so bold as to 
 
 She ran through the ensuing scene in the drawing-room 
 Mrs. Lowther's words. Something had possessed her, she 
 said, a ghost of the past. That threw no light upon her 
 action, seeing that David had not succeeded in identifying 
 the ghost. Nor did those other words help, about the 
 dropped stitches; nor those How suddenly passion- 
 ate the usually calm voice had become, when her mother had 
 adjured her to cling to her true beliefs ! Back to the din- 
 ner-table went David's mind. "Your mother ig fighting," 
 Cranley-Chance had said, "the cause of the sentimentalists." 
 
 Surely oh, no! Yet To be sure, David had been 
 
 disposed to look upon her mother's intelligence as no 
 stronger than her character; but even so 
 
 "Mademoiselle," said Victorine, "supper is ready, and 
 Madame awaits the rice and milk which the doctor has 
 ordered her."
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 I SHALL leave St. Anne's," said Hall, "as soon as I've 
 done my time." 
 
 He and Burdon were walking down Oxford Street to- 
 gether, and Burdon turned his head with a quick movement 
 of surprise. 
 
 "Why, I thought you said " he began. 
 
 "So I did, but I've changed my mind. Only as to details, 
 though only as to that particular hospital. I shall attach 
 myself to St. Giles's." 
 
 "That's where Uncle Bernard is." 
 
 "Precisely; that's why I'm going there." 
 
 "Just the reason why I should keep away; there's the 
 difference between us." 
 
 "The difference between us is that you're an ass and I'm 
 a wise man." 
 
 "He always gives me a sort of Tommy-make-room-for 
 your-uncle sort of feeling. Never quite at my ease with 
 him." 
 
 "That's your fault, I should say. Besides, what's the 
 odds? If an uncle's supposed to lord it over you a bit, 
 he's supposed also to give you tips. Well, I mean to get 
 tips out of Lowther." 
 
 "7 never did." 
 
 "I don't mean half-crowns." 
 
 "No, I didn't suppose you did. I'm not quite such an 
 ass as you take me for, Hall. But when I did mean half- 
 
 87
 
 88 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 crowns, it never came off except once, and then it was a 
 florin. I've changed since then, but I don't know that 
 Uncle B. has." 
 
 "Yet he's a generous man. Look at his donation to the 
 Cancer Research." 
 
 "Oh, yes, I know. Yes, in a big sort of way he'll do 
 things now and again; but it's generally Funds. Now, 
 I'm not a Fund, and what I like is a chap who'll stand 
 me a dinner." 
 
 "What I like is a chap who'll tell me what I want to 
 know; and if you don't choose to wear the shoes circum- 
 stances have put in your way, why, I mean to put 'em 
 on/' 
 
 "Oh, put 'em on, by all means; only hope they'll fit 
 you better than they do me." 
 
 "I'll make 'em fit till I get into boots." 
 
 "By which I suppose you mean an appointment. I don't 
 know whether the uncle's good for much in that direction." 
 
 "He has helped men when he sees they mean business 
 and why not me?" 
 
 "Oh, I dare say." Burdon spoke abstractedly. "I'm 
 thinking of making a change, too," he announced presently. 
 
 "You? What?" 
 
 "Well, I doubt whether I shall do much good where I 
 am." 
 
 Hall, in full agreement with the statement, was dis- 
 creetly silent, and Percy went on. 
 
 "I've been thinking things over," he said, "and a G.P. 
 beginning in London hasn't very much of a chance, you 
 know." 
 
 "Always said so." 
 
 "Unless he's got interest or is a shining light. Now, I'm 
 not one and haven't got t'other."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 89 
 
 'Again Hall mentally agreed. What he said was, "Not 
 much interest, I suppose." 
 
 "Barring the uncle, and as he doesn't believe in me, it's 
 not much good. Well, in the country, or a provincial 
 town " 
 
 "Lord !" said Hall to himself. 
 
 " a chap's got more of a field. So many of those 
 country chaps grow into out-of-date fogeys; and if you've 
 got the modern ideas and keep abreast of the times, and 
 all that, it seems to me you might make a deuced good 
 thing of it." 
 
 "Yes," said Hall slowly, "yes. If you get the right man- 
 ner, old chap." 
 
 "Oh, I'll pick it up," laughed Percy. "By the time I've 
 distributed pills and draughts to all the old ladies, I'll have 
 got it, you bet. Tell you what it is, old man, dramatic 
 instinct's half the battle in our trade." 
 
 "Have you got dramatic instinct?" 
 
 "Enough to play the part, I fancy." 
 
 "The part of a country G.P. !" thought Hall contemptu- 
 ously. "It don't take much." 
 
 "If I only had Gale's brains," Percy went on. 
 
 Hall was nettled ; he thought himself much cleverer than 
 Gale. 
 
 "If I had Sidney's brains, I'd stay in London and risk it." 
 
 "Gale's a rotter," said Hall testily. "I've said it to him- 
 self, and I say it to you. He'll never do any good." 
 
 "Don't agree. I believe in old Sidney." 
 
 "He's such a wild chap." 
 
 "Oh, he'll settle down; there's no harm in him." 
 
 "I don't mean rowdiness; I mean in his ideas. Sort of 
 fellow who might take up a fad any day and stick to it." 
 
 "He'll settle down," said Burdon again.
 
 90 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "Well, we'll see; but I doubt it." 
 
 If the two young men could have seen into Gale's mind 
 at this time, the triumph would have been with Burdon ; for 
 Gale, after a period of restless indecision, had determined to 
 put away his doubts and follow his profession steadily, ac- 
 cording to the canons which that profession laid down. The 
 profession was a noble one, composed in the main of noble- 
 minded men; its methods and practices, agreed upon by a 
 consensus of opinion, must, in the main, be noble, too. So 
 he reasoned ; and that there were men in it who might fall 
 below its standard of high aim and action, who might abuse 
 its methods and possibly their own opportunities, seemed to 
 him almost an argument in favour of his thesis, since it is 
 an accepted axiom that the exception proves the rule. So 
 he degraded certain men, Moreton Shand amongst them, 
 from a share in his esteem, and welded the unknown units 
 of the profession into a corporate and glorious body which 
 he placed upon a throne of admiration. 
 
 This done, the chamber of his convictions swept and 
 garnished, and the mind which cherished them at ease with 
 itself, there remained but one other step between him and 
 complete serenity; he must break off his intimacy with 
 Cameron. The recognition of such a necessity cost him 
 a pang and a qualm ; a pang because the loosening of the 
 tie would be a distress to himself ; a qualm because he feared 
 it might be a distress to Cameron. Yet it must be done, he 
 felt, if he were not to be drawn aside from the path he had 
 determined to walk in. Cameron's personality interested 
 him ; his ideas stimulated and appealed to him ; after a talk 
 in the ugly dining-room Gale would go away with flaming 
 cheeks, tense mind, and a brain filled with suggestive 
 thoughts. But the thoughts led along avenues which ran at 
 right angles with the road he meant to tread. Speculative
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 91 
 
 philosophy and Utopian ideals opened out entrancing fields 
 for the poet and the dreamer, but must be shut away from 
 the vision of a man whose daily necessity was to earn his 
 bread, and whose cherished aim was to help the world in a 
 practical way. It did not occur to Gale that that very aim 
 was a dream, so long as it remained unaccomplished ; that 
 all plans and hopes and ambitions are but dreams, and must 
 be conceived as dreams, ere they can be born as realities; 
 and that the only difference between the dreams men fash- 
 ion is that some men have a loftier and so a wider vision, 
 and, seeing upward and afar beyond the sight of the self- 
 bound eye, declare the possibility and strive after the attain- 
 ment of conditions unperceived by the bulk of the race. 
 
 But to do what Gale meant to do was not easy. To drop 
 the friendship with Cameron altogether would be simple 
 enough ; but Gale could not brng himself so to hurt as he 
 knew such action would hurt the man who had been kind 
 to him. Yet to diminish the intimacy while maintaining 
 the friendship seemed almost impossible. He tried leaving 
 longer intervals between his visits, and then found himself, 
 as soon as he was in Cameron's room, apologising for not 
 having come before. At last he made up his mind that the 
 only thing to do was, as he put it to himself, to tell 
 Cameron straight. 
 
 The task seemed more difficult in the performance than 
 it had appeared in contemplation. It was all very well to 
 take his courage in both hands and go boldly to call on 
 Cameron; but it was disconcerting to receive a hearty 
 welcome; to detect no shadow of resentment at the length 
 of time that had elapsed since his last visit, in either the 
 word or the manner of his host ; to be pushed into a chair 
 and have a tobacco jar placed at his elbow. 
 
 Gale, in his embarrassment, began by saying he would
 
 92 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 not smoke, and Cameron eyed him keenly. Something 
 was coming; but what? He had not long to wait, for 
 Gale, more straightforward than diplomatic, soon plunged 
 into what he had to say. 
 
 The older man listened, at first puzzled and uncompre- 
 hending ; hut as soon as he saw the younger man's drift, he 
 did his best to help him out. 
 
 "It comes to this, doesn't it, laddie," he said, when 
 Gale paused, stumbling in speech and crimson in the face, 
 "that the things I say jar with the views you want to 
 hold, and you can't find room for both ?" 
 
 "I I suppose so," said Gale with a gulp. 
 
 "And so, as you've bound yourself to the one set of 
 views, you must give up considering the others." 
 
 "Ye yes though it sounds deuced narrow." 
 
 "It's almost too naive to be narrow." 
 
 "And so ungrateful." 
 
 "No, I understand; and I'm glad you were honest with 
 me." 
 
 "You see, it's really a compliment." 
 
 Gale's hair by this time was rampant; his eyes were 
 wistful. 
 
 "To be honest? Yes, I know it is. I should have been 
 hurt if you had slacked off without a word." 
 
 "No. I didn't mean that'; meant the slacking off. It's 
 because you have the power to affect me so, to to disturb 
 me that I in fact, I can't stand it." 
 
 Cameron's only answer was a slow smile. 
 
 "All the time I don't agree with you, and if anybody 
 else talked as you talk, I shouldn't care that." Gale snapped 
 his fingers. "But with you it's different; it upsets my 
 work, and and "
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 93 
 
 "Yes, yes; don't go into it again. I understand. You 
 must just come in for a few minutes now and again and 
 tell me how you're getting on." 
 
 Gale rose and held out his hand. "Thank you," he 
 said; "thank you awfully." 
 
 "It's all right. Smooth down your hair, laddie, before 
 you go."
 
 GALE walked away from Hinde Street upbraiding 
 himself for his own instability. To be obliged to 
 avoid a friend because that friend held views which con- 
 flicted with his own could anything be more despicable? 
 If Cameron's ideas were wild and absurd, why was he dis- 
 turbed by them he who in the ordinary way did not care 
 a brass farthing what anybody thought? He refused to 
 acknowledge that somewhere in the recesses of his mind was- 
 a corner in which those ideas of Cameron's met with secret 
 agreement, and that in that corner, not in Cameron's argu- 
 ments, lay the keystone to his position. It was wiser, safer, 
 to go on reproaching himself; and it was a relief to ha.ve 
 the reproaches broken in upon, even by a beggar's whine. 
 
 "Spare me a copper, sir," said a woman's voice; and 
 Gale, glad of the diversion, stopped and put his hand in his 
 pocket. 
 
 As he turned, the woman started. "Why, it's " she 
 
 said, and stopped. 
 
 He knew her at once. He had seen the face first, troubled 
 and anxious, then brightening at his reassuring words, in 
 the ward at St. Anne's; he had seen it later in the oper- 
 ating theatre, pale with fear, then tranquil in unconscious- 
 ness; and lastly he had seen it scarred and mutilated, full 
 of upbraiding. 
 
 With that latest vision came the memory of reproachful 
 words: "You didn't tell me the truth." He had not been 
 
 94
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 95 
 
 able to explain to her that he had spoken the truth, that 
 the treachery lay not in his assurances, but in the surgeon's 
 act; an unwritten law of loyalty compelled him to lame 
 excuse, or to silence; and he had chosen 'the latter, veiling 
 it with the words, "I made a mistake." 
 
 Of late he had put the face out of his thoughts; it was 
 the label of Moreton Shand's descent in his esteem, and it 
 lay, with the man who had marred it, on the shelf of those 
 exceptions which proved the ruling npbility of medical 
 men and methods. Now, as he saw it again, the whole 
 incident came back to him; an incident in the life of tho 
 hospital, a drama in that of the woman who stood beside 
 him. 
 
 "It's Mrs. Jennings, isn't it?" he said. "I'm sorry to 
 
 see you " "begging," he was going to say, but stopped 
 
 and substituted "like this." 
 
 "It's what I've come to. I lost my job through being 
 kep' so long in the 'orspital; and then this" she touched 
 her disfigured cheek "has stood in the way of my getting 
 another.'" 
 
 "But but surely it doesn't interfere? If it was your 
 hand, now or if you couldn't walk " 
 
 The woman gave a- little laugh ; it was almost amusing, 
 the ignorance of these well-to-do people ; and, to her, Sidney 
 Gale belonged to the ranks of the rich. Almost amusing it 
 was, but not altogether; and so there was more scorn than 
 mirth in the laugh. 
 
 "When there's dozens after one job, it's not a face like 
 mine as gets picked out to take it on," she said. 
 
 "But your husband ?" Gale remembered that there 
 
 had been, a gold ring on the woman's left hand. 
 
 "Killed on the railway." 
 
 "But then you have a pension surely?"
 
 96 
 
 Sarah Jennings shook her head. 
 
 "I thought they gave pensions," said Gale, who was as 
 ignorant as are most people about the conditions of any 
 class but his own. 
 
 "I dunno; they didn't give me no pension, an/ow. So it's 
 a job or begging more especial when there's children." 
 
 "You have children?" 
 
 "Two. The littlest didn't know me when I came 'ome 
 like this. She screamed orful." 
 
 "Well, I must get back now." Gale put half a crown 
 into the woman's hand. "Perhaps I at any rate, I'll see 
 what I can do." He took a letter from his pocket and tore 
 off a blank scrap of paper. "Look here, I'm leaving St. 
 Anne's very soon, my time's up there. This," he said, 
 writing as he spoke, "after this month, this address will find 
 me. Come and see me there some evening, after eight 
 o'clock. I'll see if I can do anything. I'd like to help you 
 if I can." 
 
 He walked away quickly, because he was late, but also 
 because the encounter with Sarah Jennings had upset him ; 
 for the more disturbed Gale was the faster he went. 
 
 Moreton Shand was an exception; but even with Moreton 
 Shand definitely labelled and properly shelved, the encoun- 
 ter was disquieting, since it bore out some of those absurd 
 contentions of Cameron's. For Cameron had asserted that 
 it was impossible to judge of the effect and value of medical 
 science without a wide knowledge of the world in which 
 that science was a factor ; that it was necessary to know, not 
 only the developments of disease, but the conditions which 
 bred it, the evils which rivalled it, before the part which 
 medicine had to play could be accurately estimated. The 
 idea had seemed to Gale far-fetched and exaggerated; the 
 cure of existing disease was to him the primary means of
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 97 
 
 benefiting humanity ; and he saw no reason for considering 
 that cure in connection with social conditions or the prob- 
 lems arising out of poverty. Yet here was a woman who 
 wanted for herself and her children, not medicine, but 
 bread; who, even if she had been helped instead of hin- 
 dered by the surgeon's knife, needed, besides health, the 
 means of maintaining it, besides life,, the possibility of earn- 
 ing a living. Could it be possible that there was some 
 justice in Cameron's contention ; that there was no one sub- 
 ject which could be entirely detached from all other sub- 
 jects ; and that it was impossible fully to understand, rightly 
 to appreciate, any single problem apart from its relation 
 to other problems ? So entirely occupied was his mind with 
 Sarah Jennings and the reflections to which she gave rise, 
 that he reached the hospital without having once thought of 
 Miss Lowther an experience which, at this period of Gale's 
 life, was almost unique.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 DAVID on her side was certainly not thinking of Gale. 
 She did not think of him much at any time, and 
 just now her mind was fully occupied by Judith Home, her 
 illness and her delinquency. For David, tender to the in- 
 valid, was, at this time, hostile to the woman. It was un- 
 pardonable of Mrs. Home to have aired her narrow and 
 ignorant ideas in the presence of a girl whose father held 
 ihe views and position of Dr. Lowther; it was bad taste; 
 and for David to pronounce a thing to be bad taste was to 
 eet upon it the hall-mark of disapproval. To be sure, at 
 the end of her tirade, Mrs. Home had made a sort of apol- 
 ogy: it was indeed through the apology that David had 
 become aware of the fault; but she had shown no disposi- 
 tion to withdraw her charge, and so could hardly be for- 
 given. Yet, being ill, she must be treated with leniency; 
 it was indeed well to show her what the people she so ma- 
 ligned were made of ; so David nursed her offending friend 
 assiduously. 
 
 Judith was not ill long; she had a healthy constitution, 
 lived a healthy life, and, before many days were past, was 
 up and about again. Then David, intending to be mag- 
 nanimously superior, became, in fact, conspicuously stiff; 
 and Judith, wondering, inquired what was the matter. 
 
 David was glad of the inquiry; she was bursting with 
 arguments and -rejoinders which she had accumulated dur- 
 ing the last few days in imaginary conversations with Mrs. 
 
 98
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 99 
 
 Home, and she was longing to overwhelm her antagonist 
 with their weight and point. But when it came to outward 
 utterance, she found it difficult to marshal her forces; for 
 Judith, speaking with fleshly tongue, did not say the things 
 to which Judith, in the imaginary conversations, had given 
 voice, nor lead up to the convincing replies with which 
 David was equipped. Nevertheless, the preliminary bar- 
 riers overcome, and once launched on the pathway of re- 
 proachful denunciation, David succeeded in expressing 
 herself with considerable force. 
 
 Judith listened in silence to the tempestuous onslaught, 
 tranquil after the first thrill of surprise ; and when the girl 
 paused, embarrassed by lack of contradiction 
 
 "I wonder," said Judith, with her reflective air, "what 
 you will think of it all ten years hence !" 
 
 "I may be in a lunatic asylum, of course; but if I'm 
 sane " 
 
 "I accept the implication," said Judy, with a quick 
 smile; "still we may possibly find a common platform 
 other than that of lunacy. You see," she went on, "you 
 base your protestations all upon results, but, having a gen- 
 erous nature, there may come a time when results may 
 clash with methods." 
 
 "They can't clash with reason." 
 
 "Reason is fallible in the region of partial comprehen- 
 sion. It needs imagination fully to understand many of 
 the problems with which reason has to deal." 
 
 "I should have thought that experience was a much 
 better guide than imagination." 
 
 "The experience of a vivisector is always partial. If, 
 for instance, you cut my finger, you know certainly what 
 it feels like to run a knife through flesh, but you don't 
 know at all what my flesh feels like when the knife is di-
 
 100 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 viding it. That requires imagination. And what vivisector 
 ever exercises his imagination in the directon of the suffer- 
 ing he creates? ever thinks of anything except discovery? 
 Well, we won't argue that point. I feel too deeply and you 
 too strongly, to get any profit out of discussing it. But, 
 taking it on the purely selfish ground, on the policy of 
 results, I, personally, prefer to be carefully tended rather 
 than skilfully carved." 
 
 "I don't know what you mean." 
 
 "I'll tell you. Vivisection, which claims to diminish the 
 sufferings and further the interests of humanity, produces 
 a callousness in its pupils which is a far greater danger to 
 humanity than the ills it is supposed to overcome." 
 
 "I don't see that you have any right to say such a thing. 
 Generalising " 
 
 "I have a right, the right of my own experience. I'm 
 not generalising, I assure you. England is advancing I 
 speak as a knave advancing in vivisectional discovery and 
 practice; every year the returns of experiments go up till 
 they have reached thousands. But she is still, I understand, 
 behind France. France and Germany are in the van of the 
 movement, and here in, Lapelliere, one of the medical 
 strongholds, the way that vivisection works can be pretty 
 well tested. You agree?" 
 
 "I yes, I suppose so." 
 
 "Well, last year I had an operation for appendicitis. It 
 was very well done ; I was, as I said, skilfully carved. And 
 I'll tell you just how they did it. I went into a home of 
 course, a cliniqiie. By the way, have you noticed, in Eng- 
 land, with the increase of vivisection the increase of the 
 surgical homes?" Judith left her seat and began to walk 
 up and down the room, her hands behind her back; it was
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 101 
 
 a habit she had when talking of things which interested her; 
 a habit with which David had become familiar. 
 
 "Surgery has advanced, they say," Judy went on. "It 
 has, in many directions; notably in the number of opera- 
 tions performed. Formerly men were chary of cutting: 
 'Use your eyes before your hands' and ' Amputation is the 
 reproach of surgery'; those were the axioms they used to 
 go by. But now it's different ; now it's all for 'lopping off.' 
 I should like to know to how many patients the specialists 
 who belong to the high priesthood of the profession don't 
 say, 'An operation at once. You must go into my home.' * 
 
 "It's disgraceful " began David. 
 
 Judy interrupted her by patting her en the hand. "I 
 won't wander again," she said, "and please take it as pro- 
 posed, seconded, and carried, that Dr. Lowther is considered 
 to be a member of the present company, and therefore 
 excepted from every vilification I bring forward. Well, to 
 go back to my concrete instance. On the morning of the 
 operation I was carried down to the operating-room and 
 placed on a table. It was too short for me, and my head 
 hung down over the edge. There were two or three doctors 
 in the room, three or four students, the nurse who looked 
 after me the nurses are all men here in ihe cliniqu.es and 
 a second nurse. I was stripped, practically; my arms and 
 legs were bound so that I could not move, and I lay naked 
 on the table covered with nothing but shame. Then the 
 second nurse scrubbed me, over and around the part whero, 
 the cut was to be made, scrubbed me with a scrubbing 
 brush ; and hard, as if I was a deal board and not a woman. 
 The skin has to be absolutely clean, mind you; only in 
 England they put an antiseptic dressing on you the night 
 before the operation, to do the necessary cleansing ; and the 
 scrubbing in my case might, at any rate, have been done
 
 102 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 after I was under the anaesthetic ; I might have been spared 
 both the shame and the pain. And the pain was horrible ; 
 if you have any idea what appendicitis is like, you will 
 have some notion of what it means to be scrubbed violently 
 over the appendix. Then, my head hanging down over the 
 edge of the table caused awful pain in the neck and terrible 
 sensations altogether. I shrieked with agony, I couldn't 
 help it ; I can't tell you how it all hurt ; but neither the doc- 
 tors nor the students, nor the man who was scrubbing me, 
 attempted to soothe or help me in any way. Nobody took 
 the slightest notice of me except my own nurse, who said 
 once or twice, 'N'ayez pas peurT I don't know that I had 
 peur; I was in too great agony to be afraid. The anaes- 
 thetic, when it came, seems to me now like a curtain de- 
 scending on a sort of hideous nightmare. When the curtain 
 went up again I was back in bed ; and, as I say, the cutting 
 was quite skilfully done. So was the nursing, so long as 
 I was in the acute stage of illness. Afterwards, when my 
 recovery was tiresomely slow, I was left almost entirely to 
 myself, badly fed, inadequately tended in every way. In- 
 deed, if Annie West, who came out as soon as she heard 
 what had happened, had not removed me home again and 
 looked after me herself, I don't know whether I should 
 have got better at all. The very day I got back I began to 
 improve. Humanity ! nobody cared a pin's head about me 
 as a human being. It was only the disease and the case 
 that interested them. I tell you I would rather have a doc- 
 tor, a physician in the true sense of the word, one who cares 
 for the sufferings of his patients, who can help and soothe 
 as well as operate upon them, than all the scientific dis- 
 sectors in the world. And the two classes cannot live side 
 by side; the one is elbowing out the other. By and by we
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 103 
 
 shall have a profession of medical scientists and no more 
 doctors." 
 
 For the moment David, absorbed in contemplation of 
 the picture Judy had called up, had almost forgotten her 
 grievance. 
 
 "Awful it must have been!" she said. "However you 
 endured it!" 
 
 "As for enduring it," said Judy, "I couldn't help my- 
 self. Do you suppose I'd have stayed there if I could have 
 got away? But I couldn't move. If they'd gagged my 
 mouth as well, so that I couldn't scream, no doubt they'd 
 have said I didn't feel any pain as they do of the animals 
 who are dumb as well as helpless." 
 
 Her words recalled David from contemplation to dis- 
 cussion. "It's absurd to call them dumb in that sense," 
 she answered. "An animal can show when ifs in pain 
 just as well as a human being." 
 
 "Yes, but it can't put its sufferings into words, it can't 
 appeal to the public, it can't hold meetings or write letters 
 to the papers. It is dumb in the bitterest sense of the word 
 shut into a world whence the history of its sufferings can 
 never be issued." Judith paused, and something in her 
 eyes kept the girl beside her silent. "If it could," she went 
 
 on, "if that tale of pain, of terror, of trust betrayed " 
 
 She turned to David. "Did it ever occur to you," she 
 asked, "that the little ones Christ forbade us to offend are 
 not confined to the children of the human race ? that they 
 include all beings who are immature, whether human, or 
 struggling in some other species through the successive 
 stages of development? and that to the more advanced the 
 less advanced must be always little ones' ; to be helped for- 
 ward ; never ill-used or exploited ? I don't accept all Annie
 
 104 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 West's views, but that one of the wider evolution seems to 
 me both intelligent and just." 
 
 David did not answer; the idea presented by Judy's 
 words was novel, so novel that she did not fully grasp it; 
 it conveyed to her merely a sudden widening of horizon 
 which carried with it bewilderment rather than illumina- 
 tion. Presently she said 
 
 "I should rather like to hear a conversation between you 
 and father." 
 
 Then Judith laughed. 1 
 
 'App. 3.
 
 CHAPTEE XVI 
 
 AFTER that conversation David returned to her allegi- 
 ance. It -was not that she was any more in agreement 
 with Judith than before, not that she had consciously 
 altered the mental attitude in which she had been brought 
 up ; but she ceased to resent the fact that her friend differed 
 from her. For David was not without a sense of justice; 
 and after the first annoyance was past, she was fain to allow 
 that Judith Home had as much right to her opinion as had 
 David Lowther; and to acknowledge, moreover, that what 
 Judy had. said about vivisection and its adherents was no 
 stronger than the abuse of its opponents which she was ac- 
 customed to listen, to. 
 
 The vexed question was not again fully discussed be- 
 tween David and her hostess; neither was it completely 
 ignored. To mention.it not at all would have meant limit- 
 ing conversation to trivialities, since the vital interests of 
 life are so interwoven that it is impossible frankly to discuss 
 one without trenching on the others. And Judith's talk 
 was often of the things that matter; she was a woman who 
 lived more fully as the years grew high about her, not 
 suffering them to press upon her eyes and dim her sight, 
 but trending them beneatht her feet and rising, as they rose, 
 to a higher survey of the life through which they led her. 
 Much that she said was incomprehensible to David at the 
 time she said it ; much seemed to the girl delightfully fan- 
 
 105
 
 106 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 tastic or impossibly absurd; yet because Judy, when she 
 talked, was always intensely interested in what she was say- 
 ing, David was interested, too ; and was fascinated by many 
 of the ideas, impressed by many of the statements, which 
 she could neither accept nor contravene. 
 
 But she had not a great deal of leisure in which to listen 
 to Judy or to reflect upon Judy's words. As time went on, 
 as she made some progress in the art she had set herself to 
 study, the interest of the study absorbed the greater part of 
 her thoughts as well as the larger portion of the day, and 
 she dreamed dreams of fame which were far removed from 
 Judy's interests and philosophy. Through the hot summer 
 the dreams developed; anything seemed possible beneath 
 the brilliancy of the southern sky; fame was imminent in 
 the atmosphere. To be sure, there were days, and always 
 in each day, hours, when the glare and heat stifled ambition, 
 energy, almost life itself; days and hours when the inhab- 
 itants of the villa, human and canine, panted and languished 
 behind drawn blinds, in darkened rooms, and thought in 
 quite a friendly spirit of east wind in England; but with 
 the evening cool or the morning freshness, the glamour of 
 the south was astir again. 
 
 Then came the cooler days of steady work, and then the 
 winter, when working hours were few. David had to be 
 back at the villa before the early fall of the night, for the 
 lonely road outside the town was hardly safe after dark. 
 But though she could not paint, she could draw, and she 
 drew diligently through the long evenings. She did not 
 want the spring; for the spring meant a return to England, 
 and to the life which, though it held more variety than that 
 which she led at the villa, held also less liberty. And David 
 loved liberty. Had she but known it, it was freedom she 
 desired, rather than artistic accomplishment; and as the
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 107 
 
 time to return home drew nearer, the thought of the lim- 
 itations of home became more oppressive. 
 
 At first it would be all right ; she honestly looked forward 
 to seeing her father and mother, honestly thought it would 
 be delightful to be with them again for a time ; her hon- 
 esty was genuine enough to admit the qualification. And 
 at first there would be friends to see, and she would be 
 made much of, and would enjoy the parties and the theatres, 
 the stir of London and the stimulus born of that stir. But 
 the little excitements and interests of daily life in her 
 father's house would soon lose their colour and sparkle, and 
 the old chafing conditions would chafe her once again. For 
 her father would never allow her to set up a studio of her 
 own, or even to study, she feared, in the studio of a teacher. 
 The doctor had given way before a sudden assault, but he 
 would not daily forego his prejudices. To be sure, there 
 was that money of Aunt Emily's; but to use that little 
 private purse would mean daily defiance, and would be 
 impossible. No, she would have to take the back seat of 
 which she had spoken to Sidney Gale, and be obliged to 
 hide her light under the bushel of the doctor's despotism. 
 Yet she would make an effort to get her way ; she had won 
 it once ; why not again ? She wrote to her father asking if 
 she might arrange, after a visit home, to return for another 
 autumn and winter to Lapelliere.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 DAVID'S letter reached uie doctor m the grey light of 
 a January morning. He read it without outward 
 comment, and put it into his pocket to be considered in 
 the privacy of his study. 
 
 Mrs. Lowther was left sitting in emptiness at the break- 
 fast table. The emptiness, as far as her stomach was con- 
 cerned, was of her own choosing; but she could not eat, 
 because her heart, too, felt empty, of sympathy .almost, of 
 hope nearly, of courage quite. Last night's talk with her 
 husband had exhausted the courage; that little fount of it 
 which had sprung up, she hardly knew whence, and had 
 caused her to speak plainly after eighteen years' silence. 
 
 It was Cranley-Chance who had been the means of initi- 
 ating a conversation between the husband and wife who 
 spoke to each other daily, but never talked. 
 
 The evening before, the professor had given a dinner 
 party at which Lowther was a guest ; and, staying on after 
 the rest of the company had gone, he had had a cigar, a 
 whisky and seltzer, and a talk, alone with his host. In the 
 course of the talk, Chance had expressed his admiration of 
 Miss Lowther; had hinted at more than admiration; had 
 indeed, indirectly but certainly, asked, and in the same way 
 obtained, the doctor's approval and support of his intended 
 suit. 
 
 Lowther had come home elated. Cranley-Chance was 
 more than a rising man; he had risen; his position was 
 
 108
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 109 
 
 secure and prominent, and Lowther could not desire a; more 
 satisfactory son-in-law. There was a difference in- age of 
 course, but Chance was a good ten years younger than him- 
 self, and David was the sort of girl who 4 would be all the 
 better with a husband who would take the upper hand. The 
 doctor, with all his investigations- into the function of the 
 brain in psychology, had not yet arrived at the discovery 
 that age does not inevitably constitute authority. And 
 David would settle down, too, when married to a clever, 
 capital fellow like Chance, would give up those immature 
 girlish ideas about being an artist, and take up the desirable 
 position of an eminent man's wife. She might ha.ve married 
 some long-haired chap Lowther's short-cropped head grew 
 bristly as he thought of it who would have been a constant 
 thorn in his side; whereas Cranley-Chance would add 
 laurels to the crown, of his reputation. It was splendid ; he 
 did not know when- he had been so pleased ; and he reached 
 home in spirits which only required an outlet to become 
 exuberant. 
 
 Mrs. Lowther was hardly an outlet; but she had ears; 
 and she was still sitting knitting by the drawing-room fire 
 when Lowther, seeing a light beneath. the door, looked in on 
 his way upstairs. Besides, she was David's mother, a fact 
 which somehow only occasionally occurred to David's 
 fa.tb.er; and well, all women were match-makers, and it 
 would be a novel sensation to discuss a common interest 
 with her, and see her face light up, perhaps as it used to 
 do long ago *vhen she heard what he had to say. 
 
 But Bertha Lowther's face, far from lighting up, fell 
 with consternation; and her words, jerked out with the 
 effort of uttering them, fell upon the doctor's ears with the 
 shock of an unexpected explosion. 
 
 "I will never give my consent," said David's mother.
 
 110 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Surprise held the doctor dumb ; for a moment or two he 
 simply stood and stared at the little woman in the dowdy 
 dress, with hands that trembled as they clasped each other 
 across a mass of brown yarn. 
 
 "Not give your consent?" was all he found to say at the 
 
 end of the pause. Then, "What the deuce " he began, 
 
 and paused again. 
 
 "Bernard," said Mrs. Lowther. She kept her voice even ; 
 she tried to go on knitting, but David, if she had been pres- 
 ent, would have had the satisfaction of noting that she 
 dropped more stitches than she caught up. "Bernard, you 
 may think that I've changed, that because I'm passive I've 
 given way in my own mind, or forgotten. It isn't so ; I I 
 think just the same; and I will never allow David to run 
 the risk of suffering as I have suffered/' 
 
 Lowther looked down at his wife with a half-puzzled 
 expression on his face. His surprise had given way to con- 
 tempt, but with the contempt went a certain flavouring of 
 curiosity. What was it in the little fool, he was thinking, 
 that made her so persistent in regard to this one idea? Ah, 
 one idea; that was just it; a sort of idee fixe that distorted 
 her vision and absorbed the whole force of her mentality. 
 Lowther shrugged his shoulders; she was hysterical of 
 course, must be treated as a patient rather than an op- 
 ponent; he caressed his clean-shaven chin with his left 
 hand, a trick he had when thinking out a diagnosis. 
 
 "David," said he, "is made of different stuff from you; 
 she takes after me, and her views are no more morbid than 
 mine are." 
 
 "A girl has no views; she thinks as she's been brought 
 up. It's when you run up against things you haven't under- 
 stood that you begin to have views."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 111 
 
 "As for understanding! Ever since ?he could think at 
 
 all, I have explained and she has agreed " 
 
 "It's different when you argue; but arguments don't 
 make you understand, especially your kinds of arguments; 
 they only stand in the way of your understanding. David's 
 my only child, and I won't let her run any risks." 
 
 "Pooh!" said Lowther. "Isn't she mine, too? and more 
 mine than yours, because she's got more of my nature in 
 her." He was losing sight of the patient in the tiresome 
 woman. 
 
 "She does take after you in many ways which might 
 make it worse. She has your courage, Bernard, and she 
 couldn't be quiet as Fve been." 
 
 "And my common sense, thank God! There's no fear 
 of her taking up with your ridiculous notions. You're 
 wasting time over a thing that couldn't happen." 
 
 "That's as it may be." Mrs. Lowther gave up her at- 
 tempt at knitting. "But I I'll never agree to her marry- 
 ing Cranley- Chance, Bernard. I couldn't." 
 
 Then the doctor's temper went altogether, and he had no 
 further thought of diagnosis. "And a damned lot of good 
 may it do you!" he cried. "Do you suppose you've any 
 chance against David and me?" 
 
 He flung out of the room, and Mrs. Lowther, after a few 
 minutes, during which she sat white and trembling by the 
 fire, rose up and carried her knitting over to the blue work- 
 basket in the corner. The knitting was no longer a stock- 
 ing, but a mass of confusion, yet the fact hardly disturbed 
 her. Within her was a thought that cheered her down- 
 trodden self-respect. "I spoke up," she said to herself, "I 
 did speak up." 
 
 There was comfort, too, in another thought, one which 
 apparently had not occurred to her husband : it was possible
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 that David herself might not wish to marry Cranley- 
 Chance. 
 
 But the next morning came reaction and emptied her 
 heart of hope. Bernard was so masterful, and David, with 
 all her spirit and love of her own way, was, after all, a 
 woman; therefore, as Mrs. Lowther argued, weak; and 
 therefore, according to her experience of the world, destined 
 to be sacrificed to the strong. She had seen her daughter's 
 handwriting beside the doctor's plate and had hungered 
 for a message; but Lowther had read the letter in silence 
 and left the table without breaking it. So she felt very 
 desolate as she sat looking forlornly at the tea-pot, and suf- 
 fering, in addition to her anxiety, from that super self- 
 consciousness known only to the reserved after their reserve 
 has been, ever so slightly, broken through. 
 
 Lowther, meanwhile, was in his study, re-reading David's 
 letter. If his wife were going to make a fuss, the plan 
 which David suggested was worthy of consideration. Bertha 
 was longing, he knew, for the girl's return; her presence 
 was the chief joy in her mother's life; and the possibility 
 of her renewed absence would be a weapon in his hand. But 
 then, he thought, what, after all, did his wife's opposition 
 matter ? it would be too easily brushed aside to count as a 
 factor in the situation. Besides, David must be on the 
 spot, conveniently located for courtship; he decided that 
 all idea of going back to Lapelliere must be stamped out 
 of her mind. That mind must be left quite free to receive 
 the idea of becoming Cranley-Chance's wife. 
 
 David, when she got her father's reply, was hardly 
 disappointed ; it was of the kind she had expected. Never- 
 theless, she would still fight against the back seat. She 
 returned home determined to win her way, at least to the 
 extent of becoming a student at the Slade School.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 IT certainly was rather nice to be back in London. 
 "And perhaps," said David to herself, "a complete 
 change of mental atmosphere is good for one's work." 
 
 Certainly the atmosphere of Harley Street was different 
 from that of the villa; but what David really found ex- 
 hilarating was the admiration of certain young men, whose 
 attentions, she had told herself at Lapelliere, she could well 
 dispense with, but whose allegiance, when renewed, was 
 not other than welcome. That Cranley-Chance had joined 
 the ranks of her suitors was not at first apparent to her; 
 he was too old to enter such lists; and it was because she 
 was her father's daughter that he sought her out and took 
 so much trouble to put amusement and pleasure in her 
 way. 
 
 As regarded Sidney Gale, whom she found to be a fre- 
 quent visitor in her mother's drawing-room on Sunday aft- 
 ernoons, the case was different. It was natural that he 
 should admire her; it would indeed have argued an in- 
 ability to appreciate his opportunities had he failed to 
 do so, since most young men who came in David's way 
 rendered her a certain measure of homage. More than a 
 measure she neither demanded nor desired; but Gale showed 
 signs of exceeding the necessary meed, and David could 
 not be said to discourage him. The young man interested 
 her; a combination of boldess and diffidence in him ap- 
 pealed to her woman's craving to be both worshipped and 
 
 113
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 upheld; and he impressed her, in that she could not take 
 him up and lay him down at will, as was the case with most 
 of those who knelt at her shrine. Gale, indeed, held her in 
 such high esteem as to count her incapable of caprice, and 
 so overrode the methods of minor flirtation as to lift his 
 courtship of her to a level above coquetry. For his court- 
 ship now was definite and purposeful, not an unrealisable 
 dream, as it had seemed when he had seen her last. She 
 was still to him as a star, but he was no longer disposed 
 to play moth; he would rise on wings stronger than those 
 of any moth, not indeed to her level, but high enough to 
 make her his own. It was characteristic of him that it was 
 the worth and charm of her nature, the purity and romance 
 of her young womanhood, which caused him to set her on 
 so high a throne; the superiority of her worldly position 
 to his own offered no formidable bar to his daring. For 
 he would win both fame and fortune; of that he did not 
 doubt; diffident of himself as a man, he was confident as 
 a doctor ; he would make his way. 
 
 He had started in practice in timorous uncertainty as 
 to how far his untried wings would bear him, but already, 
 in the first nine months, he had learned that he need not 
 be afraid. One or two sudden calls in urgent cases had 
 brought him permanent clients and a widening circle of 
 reputation. Cameron was right; he felt that he would 
 succeed; and later on, when he had gained experience, he 
 would specialise and set his face toward eminence. But all 
 the time the thoughts of fame were veiled by the young 
 man's dreams of love. Fame would be the portion of his 
 middle age; but love was the glory of his youth and made 
 the world wonderful. 
 
 Chance, on the other hand, counted his fame as a valuable 
 asset in his suit. His conception of women and his expe-
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 115 
 
 rience of them led him to the conclusion that money and 
 position were amongst the most important lures of love; 
 and it was in the eminent scientist that he placed his hopes 
 of winning the girl who had charmed him. 
 
 Certainly David was flattered by his evident interest. 
 She ranked him according to the standard of that particular 
 world in which, save the year at Lapellire, she had always 
 lived ; and in that world Cranley-Chance was a peer. Flat- 
 tered she was, even while she imagined that he sought her 
 out for her father's sake; and increasingly so when it be- 
 came obvious that the attraction she possessed for him 
 was entirely her own. Even then she did not look upon 
 him in the light of a lover ; it did not seem to her that it 
 was as a woman she pleased him; but she was gratified 
 that amongst eminent men who cared, according to her 
 experience, to converse only with other eminent men, there 
 was one who counted her so intelligent as to wish to talk to 
 her whenever he was in her company. And he talked, not 
 of scientific theories or progress, but of things in which 
 she was interested; of pictures, of foreign countries, some- 
 times of theatres even; a fogey in standing and in age, 
 David admitted that he was, nevertheless, a pleasant com- 
 panion. She was quite at her ease with him, as indeed she 
 was with most people, and treated him with a frank friend- 
 liness which both he and the doctor interpreted as a tacit 
 acceptance of his suit. Lowther was in high feather; 
 Bertha was anxious; Chance was radiant with hope. 
 
 It was a joyful moment for the doctor when one morn- 
 ing David entered his study with a letter in her hand, a 
 letter on the envelope of which his quick eyes recognised 
 the writing of Cranley-Chance. The crisis had arrived; 
 he rubbed his hands and tried to appear unconscious of it.
 
 116 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "What on earth do you think has happened, father?" 
 said David. 
 
 "I'm sure I don't know," answered Lowther, his eyes 
 sparkling at the thought of the knowledge he denied. 
 
 "Well, you'd never guess, so I may as well tell you 
 at once. Professor Cranley- Chance" David blushed a 
 little; it really was so absurd as to be embarrassing "has 
 asked me to marry him. To marry him !" 
 
 "Indeed, my dear." 
 
 "Indeed? Aren't you surprised? Aren't you as- 
 tounded ?" 
 
 "Well, hardly, considering that he has eyes for nobody 
 else when you are in the room." 
 
 "Oh, father!" David's tone was one of distressed en- 
 lightenment. "I I thought he thought me intelligent," 
 she said ruefully. "I was rather pleased." 
 
 "And aren't you pleased now?" Lowther's tone and 
 face were almost arch. 
 
 "Not at all. It's most most tiresome." 
 
 "Tiresome? I don't understand you." 
 
 "Well, it makes things so awkward. You don't suppose 
 I'm going to accept him ?" 
 
 "I should certainly never suppose anything else after the 
 way you've behaved." The doctor was no longer arch. 
 
 "How absurd! I've behaved well, as if he were an 
 uncle." 
 
 "You behaved as if he were a favoured suitor. You 
 astonish me, David." 
 
 What David called the "take-a-back-seat" expression was 
 on her father's face, but she was resolved not to sit on 
 the seat. 
 
 "We appear to be astonishing each other all round," 
 she said, with an effort after lightness. "The professor
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 117 
 
 astonishes me, I astonish you, and I suppose, from what 
 you say, I shall astonish the professor." 
 
 "Don't be ridiculous ! Your conduct is " Lowther 
 
 could not find a word which seemed to him adequate, and 
 ended with "reprehensible." 
 
 "You surely don't want me to marry a man old enough 
 to be my^-to be yourself, father ?" 
 
 "He's ever so many years younger than I am. And he's 
 done you an immense honour. A man in that position! 
 You'll never have such a chance again." 
 
 "I've had them before," said David, with the mock 
 meekness with which she often cloaked defiance. 
 
 "Not a man like Chance. Why shouldn't you marry 
 him?" 
 
 "I could never feel at home with him." 
 
 "Pooh ! you don't know what you're talking about. Once 
 you begin to call him by his Christian name " 
 
 "Oh, I couldn't," said David. "By the way, what is 
 hia Christian name?" 
 
 "It's er it's Sampson." 
 
 "That settles it. I couldn't address my husband as 
 Samson." 
 
 "It's it isn't he spells it with a <p'." The doctor was 
 almost pleading. "I believe it's a a family name." 
 
 "That's worse. There's something noble about the Bible 
 Samson, but Sampson with a 'p' ! it sounds like a shifty 
 solicitor." 
 
 "Go !" said Lowther, "and don't let me see you again 
 until you are prepared to behave decently." 
 
 David went, to an anxiously waiting mother. "He's 
 very angry," she said. "He could you believe it? he 
 expected me to do it."
 
 118 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "And you won't?" 
 
 "Of course not." 
 
 "You're quite decided, darling?" 
 
 "Of course I am." 
 
 "Thank God !" said Mrs. Lowther.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 GALE, meanwhile, was planning a tea-party; bold in 
 idea, magnificent as to execution. It was bold to 
 invite Miss Lowther and her mother to come to his poky 
 rooms, for so, as he thought of David, they seemed to 
 him ; but should they deign to accept his hospitality, splen- 
 dour, so far as flowers and cakes could compass it, should 
 be their portion. Covent Garden should be ransacked of 
 its choicest treasures, and the confectioners of Bond Street 
 contribute their supreme creations. 
 
 In fear and trembling he penned the invitation; his 
 heart was in the drawing-room of Harley Street, when, 
 according to careful calculation, Mrs. Lowther received it. 
 Mrs. Lowther might be pleased, he thought; she was his 
 friend, and seldom, he believed, went out to tea ; she might 
 care to come. But David? She might be affronted or 
 amused or he couldn't tell how she might take it. He 
 continued to picture various ways in which David might 
 receive his offer of hospitality, till Was that the post- 
 man's knock ? That girl was always such a devil of a time 
 in going to the door ! Gale was downstairs, leaping half the 
 flight, and back in his room with a letter in his hand before 
 panting 'Melia had reached the hall. 
 
 Wonder of wonders ! "My daughter and I have much 
 pleasure in accepting your kind invitation," wrote Mrs. 
 Lowther. Oh, how kind of them ! how friendly ! how how 
 encouraging ! 
 
 119
 
 120 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 He looked round the room. Flowers on the mantelpiece ; 
 flowers on the chiffonier; flowers on the three-cornered 
 stand in the corner; flowers brilliant idea! on the tea- 
 table. Mrs. Crouch mnst put up clean white curtains. If 
 she wouldn't, he would go to Maple's or Hampton's or 
 \v r as Waring the tip-top shop now ? and buy curtains of his 
 own. He had given a week's invitation ; there was no time 
 to be lost : he rang the bell and asked to see Mrs. Crouch. 
 
 Mrs. Crouch came, expectant and slightly anxious; she 
 hoped it wasn't fleas ; but if ever a bed had been disinfected 
 
 careful, that bed on the first floor But Gale's first 
 
 words reassurred her. 
 
 "Mrs. Crouch," said he, with an attempt at indifference, 
 "I'm going to give a tea-party." 
 
 Mrs. Crouch was instantly affable. "Certainly, sir. How 
 many guests might you be expecting?" 
 
 "We shall be, I expect, six. I want everything very in 
 fact, exceedingly nice." 
 
 "Which I couldn't allow it otherwise, sir." 
 
 "I should like clean curtains up, the day before." 
 
 "Anything to oblige, sir, if you don't mind a trifle extry 
 for the washing." 
 
 "Not at all. And er I wonder if you have any other 
 teacups than the ones you usually give me. Very nice, of 
 course, for ordinary wear ; but I'm expecting some ladies." 
 
 "Have no fear, sir," said Mrs. Crouch. "Mr. Crouch 
 was in service with the aristocracy, and when we married, 
 me being cook in a county family, he received a tea-service 
 Dresding." 
 
 "If I can have that, I'll be quite satisfied." 
 
 "My trousseau was a dozen teaspoons, which, though 
 my mistress was plain Mrs., they were solid. And I shall 
 be pleased for you to have the loan of them."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "Thank you !" said Gale. "That's splendid." 
 
 "No ladies couldn't drink their tea more refined in 
 their own houses," said Mrs. Crouch, "nor stir it, than 
 what they'll do here." 
 
 More notes to write. Miss Barker, whose acquaintance 
 he had made during his Sunday visits to Harley Street, 
 must be invited to meet her friend; and then what men 
 should he honour with the opportunity of being introduced 
 to Miss Lowther? He did not want young men, because 
 young men would want to monopolise David. Hall, to 
 be sure, might like to talk to David's mother by way 
 of making up to the doctor; but no, Hall was too astute 
 not to realise that the byway marked "Mrs. Lowther" 
 would not conduct him to the main street, her husband. It 
 was a nuisance that Percy was no longer in London; a 
 girl's cousin was generally harmless; and he knew Miss 
 Barker. By Jove! though, hadn't Percy written that he 
 was coming up next week, bringing a patient for con- 
 sultation, and would stay in town a couple of nights ? 
 
 He ransacked his writing-table for Burden's letter. 
 Hooray ! splendid ! Percy was coming on "Wednesday. He 
 would write at once and secure him for the important 
 Thursday. And for the last guest? "By George!" said 
 Gale to himself, "I've a good mind to ask old Cameron. 
 It'll show him that in fact, that I want to be civil; and 
 he's such a generous old cock that he's sure to come if 
 he can." 
 
 Gale was right; Cameron accepted his invitation; and 
 now there was nothing more to think of, except how to 
 do honour to his guests. 
 
 On the morning of the important day Gale rose with 
 the dawn, and returned before 'Melia was well awake, in a 
 cab filled within and laden without with flowers and fruit.
 
 122 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Later on another cab, from which Gale's person, hemmed 
 in by sweets and confectionery, had some difficulty in ex- 
 tracting itself, brought the final materials of preparation. 
 To the work of preparation Gale devoted the greater 
 part of the day; the two cases which really required his 
 attendance were visited early in the morning; the rest 
 must wait till to-morrow. 
 
 A considerable work it was. It occupied Gale and 
 Mrs. Crouch till well on in the afternoon. When it was 
 completed Mrs. Crouch's "first floor" looked like some- 
 thing between a conservatory and a confectioner's shop. 
 
 "I hope there'll be enough to eat," said Gale anxiously, 
 when all at last was ready. 
 
 "Lor', sir!" was Mrs. Crouch's only reply. Her smile 
 and tone amply made up for her paucity of words: with 
 her mental eye she saw the little Crouches feasting to 
 sickness for days ahead. 
 
 She retreated downstairs, and Gale, left alone, looked 
 round with critical eye. Such common food as bread and 
 butter was sparse, and, cut by Mrs. Crouch herself and 
 reminiscent of county families, extremely thin; Percy 
 would make away with the whole of it in a couple of 
 mouthfuls, thought the anxious host. But cakes and sweet- 
 meats lay in abundance on every available space, and his 
 lavish spirit could not fear that David would depart 
 empty. 
 
 He walked up and down the room, pausing now and 
 again to listen. It was hardly the time yet, and they 
 would probably not be quite punctual. Stay! was that 
 not a ring ? and yes, a pause, a closing door, and 'Melia's 
 unmistakable footstep on the stair. 
 
 "Percy, probably come early," thought Gale; but when 
 'Melia opened the door she was alone.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 123 
 
 "The person called Jennings wish to see you, sir." 
 
 "Sarah Jennings! Come now! What a bore! Con- 
 found her! Tell her I can't see her," was Gale's first 
 thought. 
 
 'Melia perhaps saw it written in his face. "She says 
 it's very pertick'ler," she said. 
 
 Gale glanced at his watch. "Oh, well, show her up- 
 quick ; I haven't much time. Say," he called after 'Melia's 
 retreating figure, "say that I've only five minutes." 
 
 The woman had been to his rooms several times, and 
 he had done his best to help her, both by giving her such 
 small sums of money as he could afford, and by trying to 
 find her employment. The first method was inadequate, 
 the second proved unsuccessful; there were such numbers 
 of women wanting work, and Sarah Jennings, with her 
 scarred face, presented no very attractive appearance. 
 Unluckily, too, she was of those who are not improved 
 by adversity; misfortune, far from bracing, depressed 
 her. A well-meaning woman, content to earn her liveli- 
 hood by hard work so long as work could be secured, but 
 nervous in temperament and not too strong in body, pri- 
 vation and anxiety weakened both her moral fibre and her 
 physical frame; months of vain endeavour had produced 
 in her a tendency to lose heart; perhaps also a tendency 
 to seek hope or hide from despair in the only way that 
 seemed open to her. ;0nce lately when she had come to 
 his lodgings Gale had fancied that he detected in her a 
 slight confusion of ideas, a slight unsteadiness of speech; 
 and his sympathy received a shock: for he had not yet 
 thought deeply enough to have escaped from the wide- 
 spread idea that those who are touched by trial must 
 immediately rise to heroism. 
 
 According to this idea, a tramp, doing his ten or
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 fifteen or twenty miles a day, must never enter a public- 
 house, however thirsty he may be, however weary or de- 
 pressed, however weak from the starvation diet of the 
 casual ward; if he does, if he fails to display unfailing 
 fortitude, he is an undeserving case, worthy neither of 
 aid nor sympathy. His neighbour, travelling on a bicycle, 
 may go in and out, beheld and uncondemned of all men; 
 nay, even those who walk from choice may with impunity 
 do the same; but as soon as it is necessity which limits 
 the means of locomotion to the feet, a man must rise 
 above the common needs of men. According to this idea, 
 those dismissed from one kind of employment must be- 
 come instantly capable of taking up any other; a man who 
 has been a clerk must be able to do a day's work in the 
 dockyard without turning a hair. If the hair, like the trod- 
 den worm, does turn, if aching muscles and trembling limbs 
 compel cessation of the unwonted task, he is an idle beg- 
 gar who won't work when work is offered him. Accord- 
 ing to this idea, men and women, struggling for bare sub- 
 sistence, crushed by anxiety or hopeless in destitution, 
 must be cast in so perfect a mould as to depart no whit 
 from the path of honesty, sobriety, cleanliness, industry, 
 and resignation. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is a fact, plain and actual, that misery 
 does not stamp out all human weaknesses; that industry 
 is not the inevitable result of being thrown out of work; 
 that empty bellies do not directly inculcate sobriety. It 
 is possible to be wretched, yet faulty ; and possible to sink 
 below the level of heroic endurance, and yet to be not 
 altogether an undeserving case. 
 
 But these facts, patent, it would seem, elude the ob- 
 servation of the majority of those who need take no
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 125 
 
 thought for to-morrow's breakfast; and to that majority 
 Sidney Gale, in the first year of his medical practice, 
 belonged. So that when Sarah Jennings showed signs of 
 having borrowed courage from that usurer whose terms 
 lead frequently to insolvency of will-power and of nerves, 
 his sympathy cooled. Now, when for the second time she 
 presented herself in the condition best described as mud- 
 dled, disgust laid hold on him. The disgust no doubt 
 was deepened by the fact that his own mood was one of 
 nervous expectation; a mood which was far from fitting 
 him to enter into the woes, or indeed joys, of any of his 
 fellows, save only those of the one particular expected 
 guest; and that he was in a fever of impatience to get 
 rid of this unlooked-for skeleton before his feast should 
 begin. 
 
 Matilda Jennings, aged three, was sickening, it would 
 appear, for measles. Very distressing, of course; but he 
 would have listened to the recital of her symptoms with 
 more active pity had that recital not been interrupted by 
 an occasional hiccough, and had not his mind been domi- 
 nated by the thought that even now a hansom was prob- 
 ably bearing David towards his door. 
 
 "I'll come round to-morrow morning." (Was that 
 wheels? Turning into Hart Street?) "Or to-night 
 
 (Yes, by Jove!) "In an hour or two " (Powers that 
 
 be! stopping! stopping just outside!) "And and here's 
 half a crown. I can't stop. I mean you can't stop I'm 
 engaged " 
 
 A knock at the front door ! In a minute she'll be here, 
 in the room! 
 
 "Go, Mrs. Jennings," cried Gale, "please go!" Then 
 quickly, "No, don't !" 
 
 David must not be shocked by meeting such a figure on
 
 126 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 the stairs, with sideward tilted hat, and such an ugly, dis- 
 figured face. 
 
 "Come in here/' he said, "and wait till I come for 
 you." 
 
 In a trice he had whisked Mrs. Jennings out on to the 
 landing and into his bedroom at the back, had banged the 
 door on her beery astonishment, and was once more in the 
 sitting-room, panting but relieved. It would be easy to 
 excuse himself presently and conduct the uninvited guest 
 to the street. 
 
 He had barely time to assume an outward calm when 
 the door flew open and Percy bounded in. 
 
 Gale wiped his forehead. "God bless you, Percy, old 
 chap/' he said. "I thought you were the Lowthers."
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 BURDON looked at his friend with raised eyebrows. 
 "And if I had been the Lowthers?" he inquired. 
 "Don't you expect them? I thought I was asked to meet 
 them." 
 
 Gale began to laugh. Percy's face conveyed to him for 
 the first time a hint of comedy in the situation. "Yes, of 
 
 course," he said, "but the fact is Just wait a minute, 
 
 though; there's a woman in my bedroom, and " 
 
 He dashed out on to the landing without seeing Burden's 
 expression of astonished consternation ; but on the landing 
 was brought up short; there was a rustle of skirts on the 
 staircase, and a voice that he knew said 
 
 "I hope we're not too prosaically punctual." 
 
 Gale, his cheeks aflame and his hair like an opaque halo, 
 went forward to receive his guests. 
 
 He conducted them with mingled pride and diffidence to 
 his flower-filled room; he was glad Burdon was there to 
 help him through the first difficult moments. Shy in the 
 presence of the girl whose visit he had so ardently looked 
 forward to, he devoted his attention exclusively at first 
 to her mother; while Percy recovered sufficiently from the 
 puzzled uneasiness into which Gale's words had thrown 
 him to remark to his cousin, with a glance at the laden 
 tables, "What a blow-out!" 
 
 Miss Barker followed quickly upon her friends, and soon 
 after came John Cameron. Cameron had to be introduced 
 
 127
 
 128 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 to Mrs. Lowther and Miss Barker, to shake hands with 
 Percy and David, and then to ask the former how he was 
 getting on; and thus David was left free to express her 
 admiration of the wealth of flowers collected for her 
 pleasure. 
 
 Then came 'Melia, laden with tea and coffee, with hot 
 milk and steaming kettle; and in the delight and excite- 
 ment of it all; in the pride of watching Miss Lowther 
 pour out tea in this, his room; in the passing of cups, 
 cakes, and fruit; and in the constant necessity of smooth- 
 ing down his rampant hair, Sarah Jennings, her delin- 
 quencies, her ailing child, and her near neighbourhood 
 were forgotten. 
 
 There could be no doubt that David was enjoying her- 
 self. The coffee, to be sure, was too weak, and the tea was 
 too strong; but the cakes were a triumph of art, and the 
 fruit was perfection. And then the flowers ! A critic might 
 have said there were too many, but what woman ever 
 quarrelled with profusion, planned to do her honour? 
 Certainly not David Lowther. She was well aware that 
 the wealth of blossoms was incense offered at her shrine, 
 and was pleased by the magnificence of the tribute; not 
 more than pleased ; since the mating of liking and interest 
 with which she regarded Gale had not yet formed and 
 cradled in her heart the offspring, love. 
 
 Having seen to the needs of his guests, Gale approached 
 her. '^You've been so busy pouring out that you've had 
 no time to eat. What will you have ?" 
 
 David, cloyed with sweets, longed for a piece of plain 
 bread and butter, but a kindly appreciation of Gale's 
 preparations caused her to curb her desire for simplicity 
 to the extent of asking for some grapes. She ate them 
 daintily, stripping each one of its skin before putting it
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 129 
 
 into her mouth, and Gale stood by in charmed admira- 
 tion ; it was like her, he said to himself, to avoid the vile- 
 ness of spitting out the skins. Miss Barker, as it hap- 
 pened, was eating grapes in precisely the same way, but 
 the method did not strike him as characteristic of Miss 
 Barker. 
 
 Miss Barker, however, proved to be a valuable guest, 
 not only because she held Percy captive during tea, but 
 because she was a musician, and, tea over, played upon 
 the piano which belonged to Mrs. Crouch's aunt, and which 
 Gale, with alert foresight, had had tuned for the occasion. 
 It took some time to disembarrass it from its burden of 
 flowers; but, that being done, how delightful to inveigle 
 Miss Lowther on to the balcony, to listen there to the 
 strains of Grieg, and to feel that, not being actually in 
 the room with the player, it was not impolite to make 
 occasional remarks in low and confidential tones ! 
 
 Miss Lowther found it pleasant, too. Gale's voice had 
 always made appeal to her; his chest notes lent interest 
 to even trivial remarks; and to-day there was a thrill in 
 the tones and a personal tendency in the remarks which 
 deepened the interest and created in her little thrills of 
 new emotion. 
 
 Mrs. Lowther, seated within, in a black silk cloak and 
 a mud-coloured alpaca, was thinking far more of the 
 couple on the balcony than of her friend's music. Heart 
 and soul, she was in favour of Gale's suit, and that less 
 because she liked Gale than because she feared his rival. 
 She knew the doctor, and she knew, or thought she knew, 
 the weakness of youth; so long as David was fancy free, 
 so long was there the chance of Cranley-Chance becoming 
 her husband. But love once roused by another, of course, 
 than Chance David would stand firm, and her mother
 
 130 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 was ready to welcome Gale, both as a son-in-law and a 
 saviour. To be sure, she knew but little of him, of his 
 views of life, his opinions, his prospects; but he had won 
 her heart; and she desired ardently to give David into his 
 keeping. 
 
 It is proverbial that lookers-on see most of the game, 
 and Cameron, not being deficient in perception, was well 
 aware of what Mrs. Lowther had in her mind when, Miss 
 Barker having ceased playing, and Percy being engaged 
 at the piano in trying to find a song he could sing amongst 
 her music, the little pale woman began to talk about Gale. 
 
 "I suppose you know Mr. Gale very well?" she asked 
 in her timid tones. 
 
 Cameron, Scotch, had the Scotch wariness, and the 
 Scotch faculty of parrying question with question. "Can 
 an old man know a young one very well?" he answered. 
 
 Mrs. Lowther reflected. "I think so; if he remembers 
 what he felt like when he was young." 
 
 "You would feel, then, that the young cannot know 
 the old, having no experience of the outlook of age ?" 
 
 "Very likely not," said Mrs. Lowther; she was in no 
 mood for abstract discussion. "But about Mr. Gale. I 
 think very well of him; and I I hope you agree with 
 me?" 
 
 "Yes, I like Gale, and I think" Cameron spoke slowly 
 "he will make his mark." 
 
 The very last thing he desired for Sidney was to be 
 Lowther's son-in-law, a position which would ensure his 
 being penned within the orthodox fold; yet he could not 
 put a spoke in the wheel of the young man's success, no 
 matter in what direction that wheel was turning. It was 
 not for him to mould Gale's destiny. 
 
 "I don't mind about that," Mrs. Lowther answered; "I
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 131 
 
 mind only about character. I think he would be kind." 
 The remark, assertive in form, held an interrogative note. 
 
 "I am sure of it." 
 
 "Some men think that if women don't agree with all 
 
 their views they are silly or sentimental; and I " 
 
 Mrs. Lowther stopped. Unused to the expression of any 
 but the simplest thoughts, the diplomatic acquiring of 
 information was hopelessly beyond her. 
 
 But Cameron had in him enough of the diplomat to 
 perceive, as was indeed not difficult, what his companion 
 wanted to know. 
 
 "I don't think our young friend would think it neces- 
 sary to impose his views on anybody man or woman," he 
 said. 
 
 "Xo? So I think." Mrs. Lowther gave a little sigh. 
 "I wish I knew what his views are." 
 
 Cameron laughed. "That would be a difficult thing for 
 anybody to say, I fancy himself included." 
 
 "You don't think he's very " 
 
 "Dogmatic?" 
 
 "Yes; I couldn't find the word. Or scientific?" 
 
 Again Cameron laughed. "Perhaps you think the terms 
 synonymous. At present," he went on, "I should be in- 
 clined to describe Gale's condition as one of fluid enthu- 
 siasm. It remains to be seen into what channel it will 
 pour itself, or whether it will, perhaps, hew out one of 
 its own." 
 
 "Scientific men are often hard, I think." 
 
 "Sometimes; some of them." 
 
 "I mean, of course, in the profession my husband's 
 profession. Astronomers and botanists well, of course, it 
 
 wouldn't be the same " She stopped, for just then 
 
 Burdon began to sing in a very deep bass voice.
 
 132 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "I always wonder/* said David on the balcony, "if 
 Percy takes off his voice when he takes off his boots." 
 
 Gale laughed, and was half ashamed of himself for 
 doing so. "He's a dear old chap," he said. 
 
 "Yes, I know; but that doesn't prevent his voice coming 
 from very low down. Let us go in and hear him growl. 
 It's quite fitting that Doggie I call Miss Barker Doggie 
 should be playing his accompaniment." 
 
 So they came back into the room, both somewhat elated, 
 Gale by hope, David by the vague delightful sensations 
 which herald the advent of love. 
 
 When Percy's song was over, Mrs. Lowther rose to go. 
 "I've enjoyed myself so much," she said, as she shook 
 Sidney's hand. "We both have." 
 
 "Are you coming with us, Doggie?" David asked. "It's 
 no good asking you, Percy. You'll stay with Mr. Gale, I 
 suppose, and smoke?" 
 
 "Yes, I think so, unless you want me." 
 
 "Oh, not at all. Don't let that trouble you." 
 
 "We shall see you at dinner, Percy?" 
 
 "Yes, Aunt Bertha, certainly. Thanks very much." 
 
 Percy, in truth, was longing for an explanation of the 
 disturbing words with which Gale had greeted him. It 
 was all very well. Sidney was a wild chap, and had done 
 many mad things ; but when he had asked a fellow's aunt 
 
 and cousin to tea, it was indecent positively indecent 
 
 The unexplained woman had sat on Percy's chest all 
 through the entertainment, and dimmed even the pleasure 
 of singing "I fear no foe in shining armour," to Miss 
 Barker's very delightful accompaniment. Gale, on the 
 contrary, had forgotten her very existence. But he was 
 soon to be reminded of it. 
 
 Coming out on to the landing to see his guests down-
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 133 
 
 stairs, his speech, his progress, and his elation were sud- 
 denly brought to a dead and horrified standstill by the 
 sight of a figure which, at the same instant, emerged from 
 his bedroom door. When David had first arrived Gale 
 had thought that figure unfit for her eyes to rest upon; 
 but the Sarah Jennings of an hour and a half ago was 
 pleasing and presentable compared with the Sarah Jen- 
 nings of the moment. For Gale had left upon his dress- 
 ing-table a flask of brandy destined for the use of one of 
 his poorer patients. It had been nearly full when his 
 untimely visitor had entered the room; it was now nearly 
 empty. 
 
 Dismay was on every face as Sidney Gale stopped short 
 except upon the face of Sarah Jennings. She, slightly 
 lurching, made her way to the head of the stairs, and, 
 grasping the banisters, stood with a vacant and contented 
 smile, repeating feebly, "After you, ma'am, after you."
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 "T SHOULD wait," said Lowther. "Girls never know 
 
 A their own minds/' 
 
 'Tour daughter writes as if she knew hers," Cranley- 
 Chance answered. 
 
 "She thinks she does." Lowther's tone was contemptu- 
 ous. "If you'd done as much clinical work as I have, you'd 
 know that girls are either hysterically romantic or hys- 
 terically disturbed. David is the romantic kind, and her 
 romance has taken the form of imagining she wants to be 
 an artist. She'll get over it, and if you've got the patience 
 to wait, you can catch her at the psychological moment. 
 Lucky for you you haven't got a more serious rival." 
 
 "Don't know that I haven't. What about young Gale?" 
 
 "Who's young Gale?" 
 
 "You ought to know, as it was at your house I met him. 
 A friend of Burdon's and of your wife's." 
 
 "Don't remember anything about him. What is he? 
 What's he do?" 
 
 "Beginning practice G.P." 
 
 "Phew! Suppose I'm going to give my daughter to a 
 beggar ?" 
 
 "She may not look on him as a beggar." 
 
 "What does that matter? Ain't I her father?" 
 
 "It's a wise father can manage his own daughter," 
 paraphrased Chance gloomily. 
 
 "What do you know about him ?" 
 
 134
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 135 
 
 "Oh, not much. Better ask Moreton Shand. He was 
 at St. Anne's. They say," added Chance, seeking after 
 generous utterance, but arriving only at what sounded like 
 a sneer, "he's clever." 
 
 "A friend of Percy's! Not likely." 
 
 "Hall's a friend of Burden's, too." 
 
 "Hall's certainly got his head screwed on right. But 
 that's a chance. Percy's not likely to have another friend 
 of that calibre." 
 
 "A friend of Percy's probably an ass; a friend of 
 Bertha's bound to be a milksop," thought the doctor on 
 his way home. It occurred to him, thinking over what 
 Chance had said, that he would go and find Moreton 
 Shand; it was just the hour when he would be likely to 
 catch him. 
 
 Shand was at home, and Lowther came away from the 
 interview triumphant. Not only an ass, but an arrogant 
 ass, with leanings towards anti-vivisectionist ideas, and a 
 not too good reputation for steadiness; he would prob- 
 ably find himself in a position to forbid Gale the house, 
 and check any budding ideas as to falling in love on the 
 part of David. 
 
 David's announcement at dinner that she and her moth- 
 er had had tea with Gale that very afternoon caused 
 Lowther to prick up his ears ; there was perhaps something 
 more than a rival's fears in what Chance had said. Well, 
 he would soon put a stop to it all; especially as David's 
 tendency to silence during the meal did not escape his 
 aroused observation. 
 
 After dinner, port wine and cigars were preliminaries 
 to questioning Percy about his friend. 
 
 Percy was loyal, but he was also, this evening, dis- 
 gusted. His interview with Gale, after the scene which
 
 136 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 ended the tea-party, had changed suspicion to certainty, 
 and he was in that state of affronted indignation com- 
 monly called righteous. For Gale, quite unconscious of 
 what was in Percy's mind, had submitted to the latter's 
 strictures with unquestioning meekness. To him his of- 
 fence seemed so black that he did not occupy himself in 
 thinking how it could have been blacker. That he should 
 so far have forgotten himself as to forget Sarah Jennings, 
 and so subject David to the risk of what had actually oc- 
 curred, appeared to him unpardonable; and he was in 
 no wise astonished that Percy should take the same view. 
 He longed, it is true, for sympathy, for a drop of balm to 
 soothe the soreness of his discomfiture, but was too humbly 
 contrite to resent either the absence of consolation or the 
 violence of the epithets with which Burden characterised 
 his conduct. 
 
 When questioned by the doctor, therefore, Percy's an- 
 swers lacked the whole-hearted conviction they would have 
 displayed had the questions been put to him a few hours 
 earlier. He did not want to betray his friend, but he 
 stammered and hesitated; his replies were unwilling and 
 evasive. 
 
 Lowther understood that Gale had a reputation for 
 rowdiness. Was this rowdiness at all connected with 
 women ? 
 
 Percy reddened. He was not sufficiently in Gale's con- 
 fidence to 
 
 No, but what did he think ? 
 
 Percy, with the scene of the afternoon vivid before him, 
 said he he could hardly say; it it might be so. Not 
 
 more perhaps than many another, but He was vexed 
 
 with himself at what he was saying, and furious with 
 Gale in that he could not avoid saying it. It was all
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 137 
 
 very well, but he saw, of course, what Uncle Bernard was 
 after, and he was damned if he did think Sidney was 
 good enough for David. 
 
 Uncle Bernard, for his part, had rarely been so pleased 
 with his nephew: he had held a good hand to begin with, 
 he thought, but Percy had given him trump cards which 
 made the game he was about to play exceedingly simple. 
 
 That very night the game began: Lowther would be 
 glad if his wife would give him a few minutes before 
 going up to bed. Bertha, intuitive by nature and fearful 
 by habit, guessed what was coming; and the forces which 
 but a short time before she could have brought to the 
 encounter, weak in themselves, were now considerably dis- 
 abled. Bernard, of course, would rebel against accept- 
 ing Gale as a son-in-law; the terrible thing was that she 
 was torn with doubts as to whether, for reasons quite other 
 than her husband's, she did not agree with him. She was 
 disposed to be charitable, and poor Sarah Jennings' ap- 
 pearance was not such as she had been accustomed to as- 
 sociate with a world about which she preferred not to 
 think; but the circumstances of her intrusion on the scene 
 were uncomfortably suspicious, and Gale had been covered 
 with what appeared like guilty confusion. 
 
 Lowther, in playing his game, was astute. He argued 
 that his wife was an ignorant as well as an innocent 
 woman; he credited her with the harsh judgment and the 
 shrinking dismay to which ignorant innocence is prone; 
 and, making no mention of Gale's financial or professional 
 prospects, he based his disapproval entirely on the young 
 man's immoral character, which he represented as being 
 recognised and notorious. 
 
 Mrs. Lowther had put away her knitting for the night, 
 and her unoccupied hands moved nervously.
 
 138 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "Yon are quite sure what you say is true?" she said. 
 
 "Ask Percy. I've been questioning him on the subject. 
 You can do the same." 
 
 Bertha looked down in distressed silence. Could any- 
 thing be more conclusive? There was this rumour, found- 
 ed, doubtless, on fact of some kind, or it could not have 
 reached Bernard's ears; there was the picture of that dis- 
 reputable woman on the landing; and there was Percy's 
 evidence which gave the picture a shameful explanation. 
 She was less ignorant and also less conventional than her 
 husband supposed, but she shrank, as he expected her to 
 shrink, from the coarseness of sexual excesses; and she 
 had not sufficient mental independence to weigh character 
 against circumstantial evidence. She judged less hardly 
 in the abstract than many women of limited observation; 
 but where her own daughter was concerned, her code be- 
 came rigid. 
 
 "You will see," Lowther went on, "that we should be 
 wrong in encouraging Mr. Gale to come to the house. He 
 evidently admires David, and it would never do to run 
 the risk of her taking a fancy to such a man as I know 
 him to be." 
 
 "No," said Mrs. Lowther, "no. But I've always liked 
 him; and it's hard to believe " 
 
 "No woman can tell what a man's like from seeing him 
 in a drawing-room," said the doctor decisively. 
 
 "That's true," assented Mrs. Lowther. 
 
 She went to bed sorrowfully, all the more sorrowfully 
 because to her was deputed the task of informing David 
 that Gale must come no more to Harley Street. And the 
 statement of the doctor's decision would not, she was well 
 aware, complete that task. David would never consent 
 to give up a friend simply because she was told to, espe-
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 139 
 
 daily if, as might well be the case, her feeling for Gale 
 had gone further than friendship; and her mother would 
 be obliged to tell or hint to her the reason why he was 
 forbidden the house. She hardly slept that night, in her 
 distress; while Lowther lay awake calculating the added 
 chances in his friend's courtship. 
 
 David's rest was troubled by the thought of the sordid 
 ugliness which for the first time had come close within her 
 vision; Percy was disturbed by a mingling of anger with 
 Gale and a sense that he had betrayed him; and Gale 
 himself did not go to bed at all till well after dawn. 
 
 Sarah Jennings, meanwhile, snored comfortably, sunk 
 in the deep sleep which is the portion of the just and the 
 drunk.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 THE fact that Sidney Gale saw Matilda Jennings 
 through the measles and forgave Matilda's mother 
 proves perhaps less generosity on his part than might at 
 first appear; for he did not in the least realise the extent 
 to which the unfortunate woman had injured him. 
 
 Sarah, sober, was overwhelmed by the proceedings of 
 Sarah drunk; she had disgraced herself, she felt, in the 
 eyes of her constant and almost her only friend; she 
 longed to make reparation, and begged to be allowed to 
 pay for the brandy which had so fatally relieved the tedium 
 of her detention. The taking of the brandy seemed to 
 her the worst feature of her offence, for she had been drunk 
 more than once, and custom had dimmed the fervour of 
 her contrition; but she had never taken anything that 
 did not belong to her, and the idea that she had thieved 
 added weight to her shame. Gale was touched by its 
 depth, and had no inclination except to forgive her. 
 
 He was able in a day or two to look back with calmness 
 on the catastrophe which had closed his party. He came 
 to the conclusion that he had exaggerated its importance, 
 but decided that in his vexation and embarrassment he 
 had not offered adequate apologies for what had happened. 
 Percy evidently was of that opinion, or he would never 
 have slated him in the unmeasured terms in which he had 
 indulged. On reflection it seemed to Gale that Percy had 
 
 140
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 141 
 
 been unwarrantably abusive; for, after all, what had hap- 
 pened had been mischance, and not studied insult, which 
 was what one might have deduced from Burdon's criti- 
 cisms. Well, he would put the matter right, and then in- 
 form Percy by letter that he was an ass. 
 
 He longed to set out for Harley Street forthwith, the 
 necessary apology furnishing a good excuse for an im- 
 mediate visit; but decided to wait till Sunday, a day on 
 which Mrs. Lowther was invariably at home. His heart 
 lightened. Mrs. Lowther and David would be sure to 
 forgive him when they understood how the scene on the 
 landing had come about, and would perhaps be induced to 
 take an interest in Sarah Jennings. 
 
 On Sunday morning he cleaned his boots with extra 
 care. 'Melia was not good at polishing, and Gale was 
 accustomed to putting a shine on the cloudy surface of 
 her hastily applied blacking. To-day that surface gleamed 
 unusually smooth and bright, and he forgot the aching 
 muscles of his arm in the satisfaction evoked by the aspect 
 of his feet. 
 
 At a quarter to four he sallied forth, tempted to take 
 a hansom to shorten the time of ^transit, but finally de- 
 ciding to walk, for fear he should arrive too soon. How 
 would Miss Lowther greet him? She had not, perhaps, 
 been so disgusted as he had thought, and she was so sen- 
 sible and so generous that she would surely not have taken 
 
 offence. When it was all explained, then Here he was, 
 
 at the very door. 
 
 He rang the bell; his right-hand glove was off before 
 the man answered its summons. He prepared to step 
 inside as soon as the door was opened. 
 
 "Mrs. Lowther ?"
 
 142 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 But the man barred his way. Mrs. Lowther was not 
 at home. 
 
 Every man who has been young and in love and has 
 gone with joyful expectancy to call at the house of the 
 beloved, will know what Gale felt like. Mrs. Lowther, 
 when his card was brought to her, endured a sympathetic 
 pang, and had to concentrate her thoughts on that un- 
 known disreputable woman before she could regain a 
 properly severe attitude of mind. 
 
 David, sitting by the window, saw Gale cross the street; 
 saw, too, the dejection of his bearing; but David felt no 
 pang. She had, as Mrs. Lowther had foreseen, insisted 
 upon being told the reason of Gale's intended dismissal, 
 and the reason, vaguely explained to her, had killed all 
 pity for the culprit. Naturally pure in mind and devoid of 
 curiosity, living a sheltered and limited life, she hardly 
 knew of, and certainly did not realise, the existence of 
 that which Mrs. Lowther's explanation indicated. Judy, 
 indeed, for whom impropriety did not exist, and who held 
 that young people of both sexes should be given sufficient 
 knowledge to protect themselves against evils which ig- 
 norance could not annihilate, had sometimes spoken frank- 
 ly in the course of the diatribes of which she delivered 
 herself; but the key to comprehension had been lacking, 
 and David, hearing, had not understood. Now knowl- 
 edge and understanding burst suddenly and together upon 
 her consciousness, and presented themselves not in con- 
 nection with a general disorder, but as exponents of a 
 particular case. She knew Gale, had talked with him, 
 danced with him; nay, had stood with him on a balcony, 
 and listened to words and tones which had thrilled her 
 to new and exquisite sensation, investing the common- 
 place street below with magical glamour. In the shock
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 14-3 
 
 caused by her mother's words, she revolted in disgust from 
 the thought of the man who had so nearly charmed her; 
 and the love which was about to enter into being was 
 strangled at the birth. Perhaps because of that dawning 
 love, the bitterness of her feeling was keener; perhaps 
 because her heart was secretly attracted to Gale, her soul 
 was more ardent in revolt. 
 
 In the pain which she suffered, and which pride refused 
 to acknowledge, she became more than ever determined to 
 follow the artist's career. She abjured marriage and made 
 up her mind to avoid men; art should absorb her interest, 
 her efforts, and her profoundest affection. So much did 
 Gale's supposed conduct strengthen the resolution which 
 his personality had threatened to destroy, that she found 
 courage during the following week to inform Lowther of 
 the lines on which her life was to be lived. 
 
 He listened at first in incredulous contempt and with a 
 secret satisfaction that he had been able to interfere in 
 what he called Gale's designs before they had made further 
 progress. It was evident that David had been disgusted, 
 as he had meant her to be; but he meant also that the 
 result of her disgust was to lead her, not to the following 
 up of a ridiculous fancy, but to the arms of Cranley- 
 Chance. To begin with, of course, he must humour her; 
 which he did by refusing to treat the matter seriously. 
 But David, a few days later, returned again to the attack ; 
 and yet again, till her father's patience and his sense of 
 amusement were alike exhausted. Then, abandoning the 
 sword of ridicule, he took up the sledge-hammer of au- 
 thority, and brought it down so heavily on her hopes as 
 entirely to crush them. 
 
 On a close and sultry day David sat alone in the draw- 
 ing-room. It was some five weeks after Gale's tea-party,
 
 144. PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 and David and her mother had returned the day before 
 from a three weeks' stay at Folkestone. Lowther had 
 thought that sea breezes would blow tiresome fancies from 
 his daughter's brain, and Mrs. Lowther had hailed with 
 gladness the possibility of leaving London. Her tender 
 heart shrank from the enforcement of Gale's banishment. 
 He had shown himself unworthy of her liking ; but he had 
 been kind to her during the long months of David's absence, 
 and she liked him still in spite of his unworthiness. To 
 wound him, as she felt he must be wounded, was pain 
 to her, and it was a relief to have "absence from town" 
 as a true and sufficient excuse for not seeing him. 
 
 The seaside had given a respite to Mrs. Lowther's qualms, 
 but it had not altered David's ideas. That very morning 
 she had again given them utterance, and was met by the 
 sledge-hammer retort of her father's final refusal. She 
 felt very unhappy, very lonely, as she sat in the darkened 
 room for the windows looked west and the outside blinds 
 were down; she missed Gale more than she knew, and, 
 confronted with the blank of his absence, she sought desper- 
 ately to fill it. An artist's life, originally her ambition, 
 had now become her refuge, though she was unaware of 
 the transmutation, and imagined that ambition had re- 
 mained steadfast. Less than ever could she bear now to 
 abandon it. Yet to take her own way, to rebel, using her 
 own little income to procure her independence, meant a 
 defiance of duty and a wounding of affections which, though 
 not completely absorbing, were strong by nature and bind- 
 ing by habit. It seemed to David that her father's un- 
 reasonableness was patent and inexcusable; yet she con- 
 tinued to love him ; as much, perhaps, because, as in spite 
 of the dominating nature which allowed no disputing of 
 his will. To be cut off from him altogether, to be forbidden
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 145 
 
 the house which was both dull and dear, to be separated 
 completely from her mother's adoring and dependent affec- 
 tion, made a prospect which she could not face; while, on 
 the other hand, she found submission, the abandonment of 
 all her hopes and plans, impossible. She would never 
 marry; of that she was sure, since men were horrid; but 
 to be all her life nothing more individual than her father's 
 daughter, sitting in the back seat which he had bidden her 
 take, was an alternative to defiance which she felt almost 
 incapable of accepting. 
 
 She had sat for an hour quite still, thinking and bat- 
 tling; she was tired now and wanted to stop thinking, 
 to forget all that was troubling her. She began to long 
 for her mother's return from Miss Barker's, to long for a 
 caller, a letter, for anything that would take her mind 
 away from its perplexities. So that even Cranley- Chance, 
 coming in almost immediately after the tea-tray, was wel- 
 come as a diversion.
 
 CHAPTEB XXIII 
 
 " HEAE Mrs. Lowther is ont," said the professor, "but 
 
 M. I thought I might venture, perhaps, to ask you for 
 a cup of tea." 
 
 "Of course," said David. He bore her no ill-well, then, 
 she reflected, for having refused his offer. That was nice 
 of him. 
 
 "I've had a hard day's work," Cranley-Chance added, 
 as if in justification of his desire for tea. 
 
 "Lucky person ! I wish I had." 
 
 The professor smiled. "The charm of the unknown ?" 
 
 "I suppose you think women are incapable of doing 
 anything but amuse themselves." 
 
 "I'm ready to be corrected and instructed." 
 
 "Instruction is not my forte, I'm afraid. What have 
 you been working at ?" 
 
 "My book. I think I told you I was writing another." 
 
 "Yes, of course." The telling her about this book 
 had been one of the things that had flattered and pleased 
 David most. She had forgotten all about it during the 
 last few weeks, but now her interest revived. She re- 
 membered that the professor considered her intelligent, 
 and in her crushed and baffled mood it was comforting to 
 be with a person who thought her clever. "How is it get- 
 ting on?" she asked. 
 
 "Pretty well." Chance's smile said "splendidly." 
 
 "I wish I'd been born a man," said David. 
 
 The remark sounded irrelevant, but so intent was 
 
 146
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 147 
 
 Cranley-Chance on trying to please this inconsequent girl 
 that he abandoned his book without a qualm. "May I 
 ask why ?" 
 
 "I should have thought the reason was obvious. Be- 
 cause men can always do as they like." 
 
 "You think so ? I know one who can't, at any rate." 
 
 "I mean," said David, quick to perceive his drift, "that 
 if they can't do one thing, they can do another. A man 
 can always work." 
 
 "Can't a woman?" 
 
 "Not unless she's an orphan or a charwoman." 
 
 "Your mother's neither, and she seems to me never to 
 
 stop working all day. I have sometimes wondered " 
 
 "whether she works all night," Chance had been going to 
 say, but stopped himself. 
 
 "Knitting! That's not my idea of work; that is em- 
 ployment." 
 
 "What is your idea of work?" 
 
 "Something that's of use to the world." 
 
 "The world wants stockings, you know." 
 
 "Machinery makes stockings." David's glance was a 
 reproof to his flippancy. "What I mean is to make great 
 discoveries, write great books, paint great pictures." 
 
 "One can do a good deal in that way, you know, without 
 it turning out great." 
 
 "If you're sufficiently in earnest, you must do something 
 good. I am." 
 
 The youthful self-confidence of the remark, the implied 
 capacity, appealed to Cranley-Chance's sense of humour; 
 but he was careful not to let his amusement appear. 
 
 "Do you still want to be an artist ?" he asked gravely. 
 
 "Of course. Do you suppose one changes from week 
 to week ? I want it more than ever."
 
 148 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "It seems a pity not to follow your bent." He looked 
 at David across the table. "Such a pity !" 
 
 She was craving for sympathy, craving too for an outlet 
 for her sense of injury and injustice, of baffled will and 
 energy. 
 
 "You think so?" she said eagerly. "You agree with 
 me?" 
 
 "Most certainly." 
 
 "Oh!" David clasped her hands beneath the tea-table. 
 "Then I wish you'd speak to father." 
 
 Lowther, as it happened, had dropped in to lunch with 
 the professor that very day, and the two had discussed 
 David, her desires and the situation generally. 
 
 "If I let her go off wild-goose chasing in studios," the 
 doctor had said, "she'll never tame down." His advice to 
 Chance had been to wait, to leave her alone for a time, and 
 then recommence his courtship. "If she gets a bit moped, 
 she'll be all the more likely to listen to you," he said. 
 
 But Chance, listening to the doctor's account of his 
 interview with his daughter, thought he saw a better way 
 than waiting. He said nothing, but he had come this 
 afternoon to see if his idea had value. Now, in answer to 
 David's pleading, he shook his head. 
 
 "You know what your father is! If you can't move 
 him, I'm afraid I couldn't. Does he absolutely discourage 
 you, then ?" 
 
 "Discourage! He forbids me to think of anything of 
 the kind." 
 
 "Poor David !" Cranley-Chance had never called her 
 anything but Miss Lowther, but his voice was so soft and 
 so kind that she did not notice the use of her Christian 
 name. He waited a moment, and then said, "I'm sure 
 lie's mistaken."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 149 
 
 "Not to let me be an artist?" 
 
 How charming she looked with her flushed cheeks and 
 her eyes alight with eagerness! 
 
 "Yes," said Chance. 
 
 "You think so ? I'm so glad." 
 
 "Perhaps you haven't talked to him as you've talked to 
 me about art, I mean." 
 
 "No, I haven't. I couldn't, of course. Father hates art 
 and artists, you know." 
 
 "And / care so much for both." 
 
 "I know. I remember seeing your collection, and ad- 
 miring it. Though I don't think," added David, with the 
 air of an accomplished connoisseur, "that I care for the 
 Dutch school as much as for the early Italian." 
 
 "My taste is entirely untrained. If I'd had more sym- 
 pathetic companionship in those days, I might have cul- 
 tivated it." 
 
 "Oh, I don't mean to decry the Dutch school, and I 
 don't mean to set up as a critic. Only, if you compare it 
 
 with the early Italian, the significance " She was 
 
 beginning to enjoy herself, and she stopped only because 
 her ideas about art were so unformulated that she did not 
 quite know what she wanted to say. 
 
 Cranley-Chance, however, came to the rescue. "The 
 significance," said he, "makes all the difference." 
 
 He was really very understanding, and it was pleasant 
 to talk to him again, more especially when, in her home, 
 she was starved of conversation of the kind. 
 
 "How did you propose to start in your career ?" he asked 
 presently. 
 
 "I have started. I studied hard at Lapelliere. And 
 now" her voice slightly faltered "it's all no use." 
 
 "Don't say that. Nothing is ever lost," said Chance
 
 150 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 profoundly. "You never know when your opportunity 
 may come. But if you could have your way, how would 
 you not start, but go on ?" 
 
 The question cut away the last barrier from David's 
 reserve. Her dreams rushed to her lips; the lessons from 
 the eminent artists, the studio all her own, the Bohemian 
 life, the successful achievement; the last only hinted at. 
 
 Cranley-Chance listened with his eyes upon her face; 
 she was very sweet and fresh, very ingenuous and delight- 
 ful; and by and by, in a home and with interests of her 
 own, these girlish dreams would die. But to begin with, 
 she should have such toys as she chose to play with; she 
 would tire of them in time, and find her husband's name 
 and fame sufficient to satisfy her ambition if she would 
 let him be her husband ! He advanced warily. He longed 
 to take her in his arms, but all he said was, "I wish it 
 might be. I wish you could have your chance." 
 
 "And you can't help me? You think father " 
 
 He shook his head. "No, he wouldn't listen to me; 
 there's no chance that way." 
 
 "You wouldn't advise me to defy him? And that'8 
 the only alternative." 
 
 "Not the only one. There's another way, a sure one 
 if you'd take it." 
 
 David looked at him. "Oh, no, I couldn't," she said 
 quickly. 
 
 But Cranley-Chance meant to go on. "If you were my 
 wife," he said, "you should have a studio of your own and 
 study under any artists you chose. The studio should be 
 in the house; I would have one built on, or outside it, in 
 an artists' quarter. You should lead your own life, choose 
 your own friends, follow your own career, without any in- 
 terference from me, except to help you."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 151 
 
 She couldn't, no, ene couldn't; she didn't like him 
 enough though she liked him; and he was sympathetic, 
 understood her. But a studio of her own lead her own 
 life follow her career! It would hardly be like being 
 married at all. She wasn't the least in love with him 
 never could be. But love ! What did love matter ? She 
 had abjured it. He was kind, and and clean. To her 
 innocence the fact of the professor's having remained un- 
 married till he was forty-six proved that he was superior 
 to the failings of Gale and his kind. 
 
 She hesitated, taking a mental view of herself as David 
 Lowther, the well-known specialist's daughter who did 
 nothing ; and again as as Mrs. Cranley-Chance, the artist, 
 famous, gifted, painting pictures of renown. It all went 
 
 through her mind in flashes. She could not ; but if she 
 
 could! He would not interfere with her, he said; she 
 should do as she liked, consort with whom she liked. She 
 wondered 
 
 Cranley-Chance waited, noting her hesitation, patient 
 and hopeful; waited, but not too long. Her dreams were 
 repeated but in his words: her career was sketched in 
 brilliant colours of his painting. 
 
 She thought of Gale (not wanting then to think of him), 
 and hated him; she thought of her daily life at home, 
 and shrank from the monotony of it. There was but 
 one way to freedom and to art, and Chance tempted her 
 towards it with admirable tact. 
 
 In the end she took that way; on condition that she 
 should address Chance as Cranley and never be expected to 
 call him Sampson. 
 
 Lowther, when he heard the news, was jubilant. "I 
 told you I knew how to manage her," he said. 
 
 His approval was expressed in an extensive trousseau
 
 152 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 and in the settlement on his daughter of five thousand 
 pounds. 
 
 David, herself, was hardly happy, yet not unhappy; she 
 was vehemently active. There was so much to do ; for there 
 was nothing to wait for, said Cranley-Chance ; nothing in 
 the world, echoed the doctor; and David was absorbed in 
 studio-hunting. She decided on one on Campden Hill. It 
 was far enough away from her own neighbourhood to satisfy 
 her desire for remoteness, yet easily accessible from the 
 house in Manchester Square which was to be her home. 
 
 Cranley-Chance, whose love gave him insight, and whose 
 insight endowed him with discretion, humoured her to the 
 top of her bent. To Lowther, who remonstrated with him 
 for encouraging David's vagaries, he said, "I have taken 
 the studio by the quarter only" ; and Lowther understood 
 that the studio was to be a temporary toy, and remonstrated 
 no more. 
 
 Mrs. Lowther was silently miserable. Once, when the 
 engagement was but a few hours old, she had gone to 
 David's room and pleaded with her daughter to break it. 
 David kept in her memory the picture of her mother in 
 her shabby dressing-gown, with quivering hands, a face 
 strangely unlike the face that bent over her knitting, and 
 a voice that faltered. But Mrs. Lowther's arguments 
 carried no conviction to her daughter's ears. David soothed 
 her mother, but did not heed her; she found in Bertha's 
 words no reason for turning back from the course on which 
 she had started. 
 
 Bertha's thoughts went often to Gale during the short 
 period of David's engagement; with all his faults, she 
 would have preferred him to Cranley-Chance. She had 
 her own code of morality not a lax one; and the younger
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 153 
 
 man had transgressed, as she believed, one of its laws ; but 
 the older had violated the principles on which it was based. 
 
 In the church, on David's wedding day, holding back 
 tears which threatened to fall on her purple silk dress, 
 Mrs. Lowther happened to glance upwards and saw Gale 
 sitting in a corner of the gallery. Her heart went out 
 to him;- they were together in suffering. 
 
 Gale, catching her upward glance, drew back. He was 
 passionately miserable; but young enough, fresh enough, 
 innocent enough, to be capable of appreciating what has 
 been termed the luxury of woe. His dream was dead, but 
 there was a romantic, exquisite torment in watching its 
 entombment; in draining his cup of suffering to its last 
 and bitterest dregs. He had put on his shabbiest clothes; 
 there was a sort of grim comfort in the congruity of 'Melia's 
 unaided blacking of his boots; his hair stood out, defiant 
 of restraint, a mass of tawny untidiness.
 
 JOHN CAMEEON glanced at the clock. "The laddie's 
 late," he said half aloud. 
 
 As he spoke there was a knock at the door, and Sidney 
 Gale came in. Eight years had taken away the colt-like 
 aspect of the medical student and given to his bearing 
 the equilibrium of the man steadied down to his calling. 
 That Gale had a definite calling was apparent ; the nature 
 of it was less patent. He had acquired neither the suavity 
 of the physician nor the dogmatic inscrutability of the 
 surgeon; obviously a busy man, his individuality was too 
 strong to be submerged in the characteristics of a type. 
 
 "I was afraid I was late," he said. 
 
 "Later than I expected you." 
 
 "Later than I intended to be, but I had a case I couldn't 
 leave." 
 
 "A bad one?" 
 
 "No ; it'll go all right, I think, now that I've got a free 
 hand. I've had a tussle. They wanted a second opinion, 
 and nobody would do but Moreton Shand." 
 
 "Ah!" 
 
 "We didn't agree." 
 
 "I'm not surprised." 
 
 "You're thinking of my hospital days." 
 
 "No, I should date the disagreement between you further 
 back than that. I should call it ante-natal." 
 
 Gale laughed. "A matter of aeons ?" 
 
 154
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 155 
 
 Cameron laughed too. "We'll call it innate. Well, and 
 you didn't agree ?" 
 
 Gale shook his head. "He wanted to operate. I didn't." 
 
 "Just so. And you won ?" 
 
 "In the end. The father of the girl wanted to kick me 
 out; but his wife believes in me, and kicked against the 
 kicking." 
 
 "What was it is it, I mean ?" 
 
 "Congestion of the ovary, wtih slight intestinal dis- 
 turbance. Shand diagnosed it appendicitis of course." 
 
 "A stomach-ache is appendicitis now, eh?" 
 
 "It almost comes to that. And if the appendix is even 
 under suspicion, poor thing, out it comes. Lord, how the 
 mortality in intestinal operations has gone up since Treves 
 with the most merciful intentions invented his opera- 
 tion !" 
 
 "Treves' operation is not the only one on the increase." 
 
 "No," said Gale gloomily, "it's in everything." 
 
 "If you exercise your logic, you'll see why." 
 
 "Oh, come, that's taboo !" 
 
 "Logic? I think it is." 
 
 "No, Cameron's entire." It was the name Gale had given 
 to the older man's opinions and philosophy. 
 
 Cameron laughed quietly. "You can't taboo a trend, my 
 boy." 
 
 "No, you must fight it." 
 
 "It's waste of time to fight your own convictions." 
 
 "Wasn't thinking of my convictions. I was thinking of 
 the operation craze." 
 
 "It's not much good fighting that; it's only a branch. 
 You must go to the root. And your trend," Cameron 
 added, "is rootwards." 
 
 "It may be." Gale stretched himself and yawned slight-
 
 156 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 ly. "It may be. Have you known Mrs. Home long?" he 
 asked. 
 
 "No ; but I have known her great friend, Mrs. West, for 
 some years ; and I knew Judith Home's mother slightly." 
 Cameron took a long whiff at his pipe, and let the smoke 
 out slowly. "She was a kind of connection of my wife's." 
 
 "I never knew " began Gale, and stopped. 
 
 "That I had been married? Yes. It was a good long 
 time ago in Edinburgh, when I was quite a young man 
 younger than you are now, Sidney." 
 
 "I don't consider myself young at all," said Gale. His 
 hair was still much thicker than that of the ordinary man, 
 especially the ordinary professional man, and it still re- 
 tained its tendency to stand out from his head. Cameron, 
 looking at him and at his clear, alert eyes, smiled. Pres- 
 ently he went on speaking. 
 
 "In those days," he said, "my views were the general 
 views; vivisection was little practised, little countenanced. 
 Men, my contemporaries, who are not only vivisectionists, 
 but vivisectors now, wrote against it then. Bradshaw was 
 one of them ; Lowther was another. Then came the change. 
 It was thought that vivisection opened up a field of bound- 
 less discovery, boundless knowledge. The end had a glam- 
 our that glorified the means; and selfishness in the guise 
 of sentiment extolled those means; it was for the good of 
 humanity." Cameron laid down his pipe. "Poor hu- 
 manity !" 
 
 "It is for the good of humanity." 
 
 "Ay? Even if it could help the bodies, diseased with 
 self-indulgence, or feeble from starvation and foul air; if 
 sera and vaccines could restore what want and misery and 
 vice had destroyed; even, if it would do all that and it 
 can't, lad, it can't it wouldn't be worth while. It's better
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 157 
 
 for men to be pitiful than even to be free from pain, better 
 to be merciful than immune from disease. It wouldn't 
 profit humanity, in the long run, to gain the whole world, 
 if it lost its own soul." 
 
 "You take a the view of a transcendentalist," said 
 Gale. 
 
 "I take the only view possible to a man who thinks and 
 is not a materialist. I don't blame a materialist for taking 
 another one, it's only logical. Cruelty is a sin of the spirit, 
 and for him cannot, as sin, exist. It's just a means, as 
 much as any other means, to attain his end." 
 
 "And do you mean to say that a vivisector is always 
 and necessarily cruel ?" 
 
 "I mean to say that pity is a thing that can't be laid 
 down and taken up again like a hat a man wears on his 
 head ; that you can't continually lose it within the walls of 
 a laboratory and find it again as soon as you get outside." 
 
 "I know men, all the same " 
 
 "Yes, yes, so do I or did know them; men with an 
 excellent bedside manner, men with a reputation for gen- 
 tleness. Yet it dulls their humanity. Such men honour- 
 able men, mind you, according to their own standard, and 
 honourable, too, in many ways, according to mine grow 
 callous in the matter of inflicting pain. If there's a ghost 
 of an excuse for operating on a poorer patient, and some- 
 times even on a richer one " 
 
 "No, no, no," said Gale, "that's scandalous." 
 
 "What do you know of Moreton Shand? and do you 
 know no others like him? And look here: I knew a 
 surgeon a great surgeon and to show he had an open 
 mind as to the treatment of tumours by electricity, he 
 had an installation put up in his own consulting rooms. 
 But when one of his patients chose to have electrical treat-
 
 158 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 ment instead of being operated upon, he was supremely 
 disgusted ; because, as he himself told me, she was well able 
 to pay for the operation." 1 
 
 Gale burst into a laugh. "I should say that patient 
 didn't get much result from the electrical treatment," he 
 said. 
 
 "When pity dies and kindliness, there's not much chance 
 for honour. And you may say what you like, laddie, but 
 the spirit of the laboratory is spreading through the pro- 
 fession. I often wish the humane men, the really humane 
 and there are plenty of them could have first-hand knowl- 
 edge of what goes on in some of these places." 
 
 "Is your knowledge" Gale hesitated "first-hand ?" 
 
 "Ay." Cameron made one of his long pauses, but Gale 
 knew him well now, and waited. 
 
 "In my young days," he said by and by, "I was an as- 
 sistant for a time in the laboratory of an experimental 
 physiologist. For a time; for I couldn't stand it. You 
 either get used to it, get not to care, or you can't stand it 
 at all. I was one of those who can't stand it. I came 
 out of it, and then I'd married what folks would call 
 foolishly young, and I had a wife and bairn. I had some- 
 thing of my own, but not enough to be idle on. It was 
 hard to get on in Edinburgh in those* days if you didn't 
 do what they called moving with the times. I didn't risk 
 it. I became an Army surgeon, and we went out to India ; 
 not to a good station. The climate was well, deadly, and 
 did its deadly work. I came back alone." Cameron took 
 up the pipe he had laid down. "Judith Home reminds me 
 a little of my wife." 
 
 Gale showed his sympathy in the Englishman's usual 
 way; that is to say, he was silent. 
 
 *App, 4.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 159 
 
 "I found the vivisection craze in full force/' Cameron 
 went on. "I remembered the laboratory, and I knew that 
 an anti had a poor chance. I'd found in India other lines 
 of research than the physiological; and when I left the 
 Army, I just settled here in London and followed them 
 up." 
 
 "Gave up the profession altogether ?" 
 
 "As far as a profession, yes. I've just kept my hand 
 in by looking after a few poor bodies who can't afford 
 fees." 
 
 "You know, of course, that Mrs. Home is a rabid A.-V. ?" 
 
 Cameron nodded. "Ay, and a militant one. By the 
 way, where did you meet her ?" 
 
 "At the Lowthers' before Lowther discovered her iden- 
 tity." 
 
 "You and Lowther are quite chummy now." 
 
 Gale shook his head and laughed. "Hardly that. Since 
 I got my head above water, he gives me his countenance." 
 
 "And will, so long as you swim with the stream. Do 
 you like him?" 
 
 Gale shrugged his shoulders. "He's clever, and I like 
 his brains. Besides, I'm sorry for his wife." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 Again the shoulders went up. "I don't know except 
 that she's always sitting still and always looks as if she 
 were sat upon." 
 
 "Do you know how Mrs. Cranley-Chance is?" 
 
 "Well, I believe." 
 
 "The child's a great trouble to her." 
 
 "Must be." 
 
 "You don't go there?" 
 
 "No. Cranley-Chance has never cottoned to me. Well, 
 good-night."
 
 160 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "Good-night, laddie." Cameron's eyes were full of af- 
 fection. 
 
 When Gale had gone he went back to his chair with a 
 troubled look on his face. "I wonder!" he said once in 
 the half-audible tone in which he sometimes spoke when 
 he was alone. Presently he closed his eyes, and, his body 
 upright, his hands resting on his knees, sat motionless. 
 When he opened his eyes again, his face was set in a mould 
 of peace.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 WHEN Percy Burdon discovered, as he did the first 
 time he and Gale met after Gale's unfortunate 
 tea-party, the true explanation of its climax, he was filled 
 with abject contrition. He went first to Lowther, who 
 laughed; then to Mrs. Lowther, who cried. To David he 
 could not go, as she was on her wedding trip at the time; 
 and it was Mrs. Lowther who told her daughter of the 
 mistake that had been made. 
 
 "You had better ask him to come and see you again," 
 was all David said. "I can't, because Cranley doesn't like 
 him." 
 
 "Why doesn't he like him?" 
 
 "I suppose because he credits him with all the faults 
 and failings that make people unlikable." 
 
 "Oh, but, David, now that he is cleared " 
 
 "The clearing would not make any difference with 
 Cranley." She did not add, "He is jealous" ; but she knew 
 in her heart the reason for her husband's dislike of Gale, 
 and recognised, with a slight contempt, that she must not 
 seek to renew even her acquaintanceship with the young 
 man. 
 
 Bertha, on David's advice, entered into no sort of ex- 
 planation with Gale; she simply asked him to tea, and, 
 when he came, said she was sorry that it was so long since 
 she had seen him. He did not know till many years after 
 why, on two consecutive Sundays, Mrs. Lowther had been 
 "not at home." 
 
 161
 
 162 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 After the second abortive visit, David's engagement had 
 been announced, and he had not again sought admission to 
 the house in Harley Street. 
 
 He had sent Miss Lowther a wedding present four 
 silver salt-cellars in a case lined with blue velvet ; and then 
 had gone about his work in a dazed, determined way, eating 
 his heart out in his acute disappointment. 
 
 The pain was keen, but there was no bitterness in it. 
 It was humiliating to think that her liking for him had 
 been dominated all the time by love for Chance; for she 
 had liked him; he had even hoped that afternoon on 
 
 the balcony, especially But she had not treated him 
 
 badly, had not flirted, as a lighter woman might have 
 done. He did not blame her; having placed her high in 
 his esteem, he saw no cause, just because she could not 
 care for him, to give her a lower place. So he kept his 
 high thought of her, and a reverent adoration, cherished 
 in the realm of romance and forbidden the plane of sense. 
 On that plane, in the years that followed David's marriage, 
 it could not be said that he lived spotlessly; but, if he 
 sinned in the flesh, in his imagination the woman he had 
 loved reigned undefiled. 
 
 He and David met from time to time; at her father's 
 house; later on, as Gale's practice grew, and his name be- 
 came a known one, at the houses of common friends. Her 
 manner to him was always the same ; unembarrassed, gently 
 gay. He thought she seemed happy, and was glad ; it was 
 certain that as her womanhood matured her beauty gained. 
 
 Cranley-Chance's prediction as to David's studio had been 
 fulfilled, but not in the way predicted by Cranley-Chance. 
 For David had not tired of painting, of studying, of giving 
 tea-parties in that domain at Campden Hill which was all 
 her own.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 163 
 
 After the first six months, it was, in very fact, her own. 
 At first her husband had paid the rent; it was the toy 
 wherewith he had lured her to his home; but when David 
 did not tire of the toy, when she made the game of paint- 
 ing the chief occupation of her life, Chance showed a 
 tentative unwillingness to provide her with the means of 
 playing it. 
 
 David was quick of perception; in the bud of demur she 
 saw the blossom of denial, and with the straightforward 
 boldness which was tactically characteristic of her, at once 
 opposed and foiled her husband's manoeuvres. Her private 
 purse, she said, the income derived from her aunt's legacy 
 and her marriage settlement, was quite sufficient to cover 
 the rent of the studio as well as her personal expenses, and 
 she could not allow Cranley to continue to pay it. 
 
 Cranley perceived his mistake; there should have been 
 no marriage settlement; his bird had too wide a cage. 
 But he was prudent, since his desire was rather to tame 
 the bird than to clip its wings; and he solaced himself 
 with the hope that her dress and amusements (she dressed 
 charmingly and amused herself considerably) would absorb 
 so large a proportion of her time and money, that the 
 studio would go to the wall. 
 
 But David liked the studio, liked the idea of it even 
 better than the studio itself. She assembled within its 
 walls those friends of old standing or recent acquisition 
 who, instinct told her, would not be welcome at Manchester 
 Square (John Cameron was amongst them; Sidney Gale 
 was not) ; and lived to a certain extent the life she had 
 dreamed of. Perhaps the celebrities and oddities that she 
 gathered about her hardly thought her a great artist; not 
 even, it may be, potentially great; but they all agreed that
 
 164 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 she was a charming woman; and David's parties were a 
 success. 
 
 Sometimes her husband was a guest ; but always a guest ; 
 the chief guest, and treated with honour, but never ap- 
 proaching to the position of host ; and it was perhaps well 
 for the popularity of David's studio that Cranley- Chance 
 was not often in it. A busy man, occupied all day either in 
 his laboratory or in the writing of his books, he could not 
 declare himself aggrieved if David also was all day occu- 
 pied and absent. She could not be said to neglect her house- 
 keeping, and in the evening she was always ready to sit 
 with him at home or go with him whithersoever he wanted 
 to take her. In scientific circles Cranley-Chance's wife 
 was a well-known and popular figure; and her popularity 
 spread through the wider and more fashionable world to 
 which the professor's achievements gave him access. 
 
 Chance was proud of her, and, in that he possessed her, 
 happy; yet in his cup of happiness there was always the 
 poisoned drop. She was his, and in all that she did, save 
 in that matter of the studio, he approved her; but just 
 because he loved her he felt she was more loyal than 
 loving. The bird he had snared so deftly was secure in 
 its cage, and fluttered not at all against the bars; but he 
 was haunted by the idea that Sidney Gale had, so to speak, 
 once put salt upon its tail, and claimed from his captive a 
 secret but abiding allegiance. 
 
 Yet David thought very little of Sidney Gale. She was 
 glad when she met him, for, the slur wiped from his repu- 
 tation, her liking for him had revived. Her interest had 
 never died, and increased as the years strengthened his 
 personality, brought him experience and skill, set him on 
 the ladder of renown. She was glad to meet him, but she 
 never talked to him much; she was aware of the tail and
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 165 
 
 salt myth in her husband's mind; she could not dispel it, 
 but would not torment him by giving it countenance. 
 For David's somewhat restrained up-bringing, and the un- 
 uttered philosophy of her mother's daily life, had given 
 her a very simple code. Marriage was sacred to her, a 
 definite sphere, denned by duty, pervaded, on the woman's 
 side at least, by courtesy; she would have thought it as 
 unfitting to excite her husband's jealousy as to flirt for 
 her own amusement. 
 
 After two years there came an interruption to her paint- 
 ing and her parties in the shape of a baby son. The pro- 
 fessor hoped that he would break the studio spell ; but the 
 child lived only a few days, and Campden Hill became more 
 of a refuge than ever. 
 
 Nevertheless, Campden Hill was doomed. 
 
 Fifteen months later came another baby, a girl, beauti- 
 fully strong and healthy, and in the first joyful months of 
 motherhood David's painting went to the wall. She kept 
 on the studio, for the child and her art could exist, she 
 declared, side by side; and by and by, as Vi grew out of 
 babyhood, the painting and the parties began again. But 
 the parties now were in excess of the painting. 
 
 Then, in David's sky, a cloud formed, small at first and 
 thin as vapour, but growing in size and density till it 
 covered her eyes and changed the focus of her gaze on life. 
 
 The nurse, in pure carelessness, or by inevitable accident, 
 had let the child fall in lifting it from its perambulator; 
 and though at first Vi showed no sign of any but passing 
 injuries, the course of the years proved that the fall had 
 left an abiding hurt. David hardly knew when she began 
 to notice the lack of power in the child's legs, the drag 
 and the feebleness, and at first she was persuaded that they 
 arose only from too rapid growth. Vi's father and grand-
 
 166 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 father, examining her in David's absence, shook their heads 
 as they noted the loss of the knee reflexes, and were pre- 
 pared for the decline of functional control, the muscular 
 atrophy that increased and persisted; till at last it was no 
 longer possible for David to hide from herself the fact that 
 Vi was a cripple, suffering and helpless. 
 
 After that there was no more thought of studio parties 
 or artistic fame in David's mind. For the case was hope- 
 less, said Lowther, said Moreton Shand, said Bell and 
 Barkworth and Stoughton-Lee ; said all the leading men. 
 It was myelites, and recovery was impossible. David knew 
 no emotion save passionate pity, no ambition save to soothe 
 the child's suffering. 
 
 In her agony she turned to her husband. "Can you do 
 nothing with all your cleverness and discoveries, noth- 
 ing?" 
 
 He shook his head. "Not immediately; but I never 
 know. Each time I enter my laboratory there is always 
 the chance of new knowledge, the chance of finding out 
 the way to help. I need hardly tell you that all that can 
 be done to save the child shall be done; every line of 
 investigation that promises the slightest hope followed to 
 the very end." 
 
 She thought of nothing but Vi; the whole world was 
 Vi; the pain, the fear, the anguish of all creation was as 
 nothing compared with the suffering of Vi. She was 
 drawn nearer to her husband than she had ever thought 
 to be; and Cranley-Chance, grieving for his child, yet 
 blessed the child, and blessed the work which, together 
 with the child, had made a bridge from David's heart to 
 his own.
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 DAVID sat in her drawing-room and waited. It was 
 late spring, a warm and sunny day, and she wore a 
 white dress and made a pretty picture as she sat by the 
 long window, looking out into the Square. 
 
 Judith Home had been in England nearly two months, 
 and she and David had not yet met. This was partly due 
 to the fact that Judith's headquarters were at Camp Willow 
 with her friend Mrs. West, and that her visits to London 
 were of the kind termed flying, but partly also to an 
 absence of eagerness on David's side to bring about a 
 meeting. To herself David hardly admitted this absence; 
 her surface self, indeed, maintained that she longed to see 
 her friend of the old Lapelliere Says; and there was 
 something in her heart that genuinely echoed the long- 
 ing. But between inmost heart and surface self was a 
 layer of consciousness which shrank from seeing Judy, 
 which was antagonistic to her, almost bitter against her; 
 and it was in this part of David that the various obstacles 
 which had hitherto stood in the way of a meeting had really, 
 though not apparently, even to David's self, found their 
 origin. 
 
 And now, at last, the meeting was to take place. Judith 
 had written a week ago and suggested coming to Man- 
 chester Square on one of two afternoons; and the one 
 part of David's consciousness had found no adequate ex- 
 cuse wherewith to deceive the other part and her friend. 
 
 167
 
 168 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Now, as she sat waiting, the pleasure of Judy's coming 
 cast into the background the disturbing possibilities of her 
 presence. David thought of the face she had admired, 
 the ways that had appealed to her, the character and 
 mind that had impressed her girlish admiration. Ah! 
 but there came in the doubt, the holding back, the strain 
 of aloofness. She had been but a girl at Lapelliere, 
 with 
 
 Was that Judy, now, turning the corner from Duke 
 Street? Yes, with her old walk and her old confident 
 air. All the doubts rushed away from David's mind, and 
 love grew warm in her heart: she opened the French 
 window and stepped out on to the balcony. 
 
 "Mrs. Home !" she called, and Judith stopped and looked 
 up and smiled at her and waved a grey-gloved hand. 
 
 David did not go downstairs to receive her guest; she 
 waited by the window and only moved forward when Judy 
 was ushered in. The two women met half way across the 
 room. 
 
 "I'm so, so glad," David said, and she was; in that 
 first moment of meeting, gladness alone possessed her. 
 
 "You are a married woman now," said Judith presently, 
 "and so we are peers, and there must be no more 'Mrs. 
 Home.' " 
 
 David was pleased; the old charm was upon her, the 
 old adoration was stirring anew. Yet in her pleasure 
 she was not wholly comfortable, wholly at peace. To her 
 direct nature, complete friendship seemed impossible with- 
 out complete understanding, and she knew that between 
 herself and Judith there was fixed a great gulf of con- 
 viction. Judith, remembering, probably, the gulf, would 
 be unaware how much it had widened and deepened; un- 
 aware that what had been in the girl a tacit acceptance
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 169 
 
 | 
 
 of her father's creed, had become in the woman an article 
 of living and passionate faith. Would it be better at 
 once to inform her, to make her own position quite clear? 
 For the moment Judith took the decision out of her 
 hands. She was in no mood for discussing any topics 
 other than those directly personal; and she must hear 
 about David's painting and her daily life, and be shown 
 over the house, and see little Vi. 
 
 As she bent over the child, David's heart went out to 
 her; she was so tender, so tactful, and so free from em- 
 barrassed commisseration. Frankly she admitted the 
 tragedy of the child's condition; frankly, too, yet un- 
 ostentatiously, she showed her sympathy. And David, 
 feeling the sympathy, almost forgot the gulf between them ; 
 and remembering it, was half persuaded that, confronted 
 with the morsel of suffering that was Vi, Judy would leap 
 its depths and take up the same position as her own. But 
 the persuasion was hardly strong enough to find its way to 
 her lips ; and downstairs there was no opportunity of utter- 
 ing it, for in the drawing-room Cranley-Chance was waiting 
 for his tea. 
 
 David introduced her friend, and was instantly con- 
 scious that friend and husband were mutually antago- 
 nistic. Cranley was pompous, superior, and distant; and 
 Judith's manner took on a mockery of meekness which 
 David, knowing her of old, recognised as a danger signal. 
 
 When she had gone the professor turned to his wife. 
 "That's the woman you were with at Lapelliere, isn't it ?" 
 
 "Yes. She's come to live in England." 
 
 "In London?" 
 
 "I don't know. Probably." 
 
 "I hope not." 
 
 The colour deepened in David's cheeks. "Why?" she
 
 170 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 asked, but the question was rhetorical, since instinctively 
 she knew the answer to it. 
 
 "Because, being your friend, I don't want to forbid her 
 the house; but frankly, though I am too contemptuous 
 of her and her kind to care whether I see her or not, I 
 dislike to receive, or that my wife should receive, a person 
 of her views." 
 
 "She is my friend/' said David. 
 
 "Sorry for it. And your child's friend?" 
 
 Again David coloured. "Whatever she may think or 
 do, her motives are of the purest," she said. 
 
 "A woman who thinks more of a few cats and dogs 
 and guinea-pigs than of a child's salvation !" 
 
 "Oh, Cranley, it's because she's never been brought face 
 to face with an actual concrete instance of what her views 
 would lead to. Believe me, if she once sees and under- 
 stands, she will take the right, the logical view." 
 
 "Women, my dear, have no logic. They are senti- 
 mentalists, and the sentimentalist has no sense of reason." 
 
 "I also am a woman; yet you have repeatedly called 
 me reasonable." 
 
 "Your mind has been trained by men," answered the 
 professor, and went downstairs to his study. 
 
 "I wonder by what men my mind has been trained," 
 David reflected when she was left alone. "I accepted 
 father's ideas when they had to do with things I knew 
 nothing about; but when it came to things I did know 
 
 anything about ! I should think perhaps Doggie and 
 
 Judith Home have had more to do with influencing my 
 mind than most people. But nobody knows anything, 
 can judge of anything, till they come into contact with 
 actual facts, tillj;hey experience things." 
 
 Her thoughts ran on, setting forth her progress from
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 171 
 
 theories to convictions. She saw herself shaken in spite 
 of herself by Judy's aims and arguments, saw herself 
 intellectually interested, emotionally indifferent; then saw 
 emotion leap flame-like at the touch of experience, kindling 
 a very furnace of convinced enthusiasm. No more philo- 
 sophical dalliance with theories; fact had ranged feeling 
 and reason side by side in fervent activity. The suffering 
 of her child, the bare possibility of its physical salvation 
 had swept aside all speculation, all questioning, and set 
 in their place unhesitating certainty. She was a mother; 
 she had a suffering child; and so she had knowledge of, 
 could authoritatively pronounce upon, all problems in which 
 maternity, childhood, and suffering were concerned. So 
 David reasoned. 
 
 If she had been told that there is no problem of all 
 life's problems which can be entirely dissociated from the 
 rest, none that is not affected by or has not some bearing 
 on the others, that all are intertwined and all must be 
 studied ere one can be mastered, she would have protested 
 with the vehement protest of limited observation. For 
 at this time her ignorance of life was great in proportion 
 to the narrowness of her experience; and her experience 
 was as narrow as is that of most people who lead the 
 kind of life that David led, who meet only the kind of 
 people whom David met, whose imagination is either not 
 sufficiently keen or sufficiently awakened to enable them 
 to realise conditions, emotions, and points of view differ- 
 ing from their own and those of their immediate neigh- 
 bours. 
 
 To her the martyrdom of disease was the only martyr- 
 dom that mattered. Tending Vi, she knew nothing of 
 the mothers who must leave their children for ten hours a 
 day to earn half a crown a week; nothing of the children
 
 172 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 who begin, as infants of four, a daily toil; nothing of 
 the tideless sea of suffering in which millions of sentient 
 beings, human and animal, day after day and year after 
 year, struggle and agonise and die. If David had been 
 told that this sea is fed by love that is selfish as well as 
 by selfishness that knows no love, she would have cried 
 out in angry incredulity. All love for another was un- 
 selfish, and a mother's love supremely free from the taint 
 of self: her love for Vi was a holy thing, and all im- 
 pulses and views which sprang from that love must be 
 holy, too. 
 
 Cranley-Chance, satisfied with his wife's attitude, was 
 not concerned to find out whether she had reached it by 
 means of sentiment or logic. He assumed that it was 
 the outcome of association with his own scientific mind.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 IT was not possible that David and Judith should avoid, 
 for any length of time, the open recognition of the 
 gulf which lay between them, and ten days after their 
 first meeting they found themselves face to face with it. 
 
 They v^ere in the nursery at the time, and David turned 
 to the elder woman a face of passionate reproach. 
 
 "How you can look at that little white face and think 
 as you profess to think, I can't imagine/' she cried. 
 
 "I have looked at so many white faces/' Judy said, "so 
 very many, of quite little children, who, added to illness, 
 had hunger to bear, and cold, and neglect, and dirt. I 
 have seen them with nothing to look forward to but death, 
 merciful to such, or life, merciless; life with starved, de- 
 generate bodies, perverted instincts, stunted brains. I have 
 asked what science, what the system you extol, offers for 
 their aid. It gives them, I find, vaccination, anti-toxin and 
 serums, in experimental profusion. They need bread, and 
 science offers them serums !" 
 
 "Bread is the province of charity," said David. "Science 
 has nothing to do with philanthropy." 
 
 "Nothing," Judith agreed, "nothing." 
 
 "I mean/' amended David, "as far as feeding goes. 
 Science medical science, I should say is concerned solely 
 with the curing of disease." 
 
 "And not at all with the maintaining and procuring of 
 health." 
 
 173
 
 174. PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "How can you maintain health in the case of of this 
 little child?" said David, with quivering lips. "To pro- 
 cure it is not that what we are trying to do? And am 
 I not justified, is science not justified, in using every avail- 
 able means to find out how it is to be done?" 
 
 "If the death of another child could restore Vi to 
 what she was, would you use that means?" 
 
 "The question is absurd. Of course I would not." 
 
 "Thafs what I wanted to know; where you draw the 
 line between honour and dishonour." 
 
 "I draw the line between right and wrong. As for 
 honour science has nothing to do with honour or dis- 
 honour. Its one aim is to know, to find out, to discover. 
 In the patient, strenuous work of science, all means be- 
 come honourable." David spoke glibly; the pronounce- 
 ment she made was one of her husband's favourite 
 aphorisms. 
 
 As she spoke she moved across the room to the door, 
 and Judy followed her. 
 
 Together and in silence the two women descended the 
 stairs, David's face showing triumphant indignation, 
 Judith's a gentle inscrutability; but when they reached 
 David's sitting-room, Judith turned and faced her friend. 
 
 "If " she began; but David interrupted her. 
 
 "We had better not discuss this any more," she said. 
 "Better leave it alone." 
 
 "Xot at all," Judy answered; "we will discuss it fully, 
 once and for all, and then for ever hereafter hold our peace." 
 
 "You had better sit down then." 
 
 "You had better. As for me, when I am on the war- 
 path I like to keep moving. And I'm on the war-path now." 
 
 Her words brought to David a quick vision of the 
 Lapelliere villa, and Judith pacing up and down the
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 175 
 
 flagged floor, giving forth from the store-house of her 
 experience and conviction things both new and old; all 
 of them, well-nigh, in those days, new, strange, and original 
 to the girl who watched, admired, and loved her. She 
 
 loved her still, and still yes admired her; but She 
 
 who had been a girl at the villa was a woman now, with her 
 own observation of life to guide her, her own experience; 
 an experience fuller, profounder than had fallen to Judith's 
 lot; and there were certain things, she felt, upon which 
 Judith was incompetent to pronounce an opinion. A 
 woman who had never had a child, to argue with a mother 
 upon the ethics of motherhood ! The thing was absurd. 
 
 She sat down with something of irritation in her mind. 
 The great gulf fixed between her and Judith was, as she 
 now recognised, not to be crossed; Judith had refused 
 the firm plank offered for her transit; and to throw out 
 twigs of argument which could never bridge the depths 
 was a waste of time and temper. 
 
 "If," said Judith, standing at first before the fireplace, 
 "the one purpose of science is knowledge; if it considers 
 nothing but its own advancement ; if its end sanctifies any 
 and every means; why, in the name of all that is logical, 
 should it not experiment upon the human body?" 
 
 "Because to do such a thing would be against the 
 general sense of humanity." 
 
 "And what has the general sense of humanity got to 
 do with it? Science recognises no sentiments and hu- 
 manity's sense of humaneness is undoubtedly a sentiment. 
 The aim of science is to know, to find out, to discover. In 
 its patient, strenuous work, all means become honourable." 
 
 "Ifs all very well to quote my own words against me, 
 but you strain their sense. Science has nothing to do with 
 false sentiment, but it is not inhumane."
 
 176 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "Indeed? That's quite another contention; and a shift- 
 ing of your position. Science is limited now. Working 
 towards its end, it must, in its methods, draw the line at 
 those which are inhumane. So the question now is, What 
 is inhumane ?" 
 
 "Anything that causes or increases human suffering; 
 and humaneness, true humaneness, is all that mitigates or 
 conquers it." 
 
 "It's a poor humanity," said Judith, "that sees nothing 
 but itself ; nothing around it save prey ; nothing beyond." 
 She began to move up and down the room, slowly at first. 
 "But your two definitions, those of humaneness and inliu- 
 maneness, are sometimes conflicting. Put it like this, for 
 instance. In a London slum, there is no, I won't shock 
 your imagination; I'll protect it with the fence of time. 
 Things that have happened long ago or far away, matter 
 so little," said Judy, with the half-mocking smile with 
 which David was familiar. 
 
 "The time of a thing's happening doesn't make any 
 real difference." 
 
 "No; but we'll put it back fifty years nevertheless. 
 Fifty years ago, then, there was born, in poverty and 
 wretchedness, a child whose fate it was to suffer as your 
 little Vi is suffering. No, sit still; and remember, it was 
 fifty years ago. The child was born of parents who were 
 drunken, poor, and callous; there was no chance of re- 
 covery for it, no hope of comfort or care; its apparently 
 inevitable fate was pain and a speedy death. A student 
 attending a maternity case in a neighbouring room came 
 across it, and it presently came about that the child was 
 removed to the hospital to which the student belonged. 
 One of the visiting physicians had been studying the 
 child's disease for many years. He had given to the
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 177 
 
 study time, thought, patience, and some hundreds of rab- 
 bits and guinea-pigs, cats, monkeys, and dogs. Yet he 
 had never quite arrived at finding out what he wanted to 
 know. His labour was almost wasted, his theories received 
 no positive support, because the animals he sacrified, in- 
 stead of playing a proper part in the proceedings, failed 
 to back him up. The experiments yielded varying results. 
 That the effect of certain processes, certain drugs, should 
 be different in a guinea-pig from what it is in a dog, may 
 not appear surprising; that it might be different, again, 
 in a human being would seem presumable. It may, in 
 theory, have seemed so to this doctor; I can't say. I can 
 only tell you that his practice proclaimed the doctrine, as 
 does the practice of experimenters in the present day, that 
 though you can't argue from one animal to another, you 
 can argue from any animal to man. So that if in all 
 guinea-pigs the results had been the same, though differ- 
 ing from those obtained from rabbits; if all rabbits had 
 responded to the experiments in an identical way, though 
 the way was not the way of the monkeys, cats, and dogs, I 
 suppose the doctor would have been as well satisfied as is 
 any vivisector of the present day, until he has actually 
 tested his discovery on a human patient. But even differ- 
 ent rabbits yielded varying results, as did also different 
 dogs, cats, and so on; and the doctor, patient still, was 
 puzzled. It may seem unreasonable to treat as an exact 
 science a science like physiology, which is not and never 
 can exist; but that is what this doctor did. Because in 
 chemistry two pars of hydrogen to one of oxygen inevitably 
 produce water, he persisted in hoping that if he only went 
 on repeating the same experiment in animal substance 
 long enough, in the end it would produce, every time he 
 did it, the same results. Having vivisected some hundreds
 
 178 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 of animals in vain, he did not reason that no certain result 
 was in that way to be attained, but only as do the scientific 
 leaders of the present day that the less satisfactory the 
 results you obtain, the more persistently you must go on 
 sacrificing animals to what is called scientific research/* 
 
 Judy was moving quickly now, backwards and forwards, 
 her hands behind her back. She paused in her walk, and 
 waved a declamatory hand. "You see it," she said, "or 
 rather, you don't see it don't realise, that is to say, the 
 wasteful folly of it in this cancer research business. But 
 it is a fact that, after all these years, after thousands of 
 pounds have been spent, thousands of animals sacrificed, 
 no cure has been discovered ; nothing that has been worked 
 out through animals has proved to be of any use in the 
 disease in man. And yet the cry of the scientists is still 
 and always the same; after each fallacious hope has been 
 hailed, each failure slowly acknowledged, the cry is still 
 'More money, more animals ! If we go on long enough, 
 we must find out something in the end.' " 
 
 Judy paused once more in her walk. "Yet these are 
 the men who pride themselves on their logic, their balanced 
 judgment, their scientific minds!" She shrugged her 
 shoulders and moved on again. 
 
 "Well, to go back to our physiologist. At the time that 
 the little slum child was brought into the hospital, the 
 physiologist was growing downhearted. He had a theory, 
 a remedy, which would save hundreds, thousands, millions 
 perhaps, of human beings from suffering, and he was 
 unable to perfect it because his material could not be relied 
 upon. But now into his hands was given material as 
 reliable as, in a science which is not exact, material can 
 possibly be. And the doctor was confronted with a prob- 
 lem. On the one hand was the whole of the human race,
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 179 
 
 around him now, stretching ahead in generations yet un- 
 born ; on the other was a little weakly child, with nothing 
 before it but pain and death. Was he justified, in the 
 interests of science (in whose service nothing is dis- 
 honourable) and for the benefit of humanity (in whose 
 service all is justifiable), in using as material for his ex- 
 periment this one, already doomed child?" 
 
 "Of course not." David was thinking of the child up- 
 stairs. "No, certainly no." 
 
 "He had on his side, on the side of science, that is, all 
 the arguments of the vivisectionists ; he had the two con- 
 flicting or complementary contentions as you choose to 
 view them; first, that the child would feel no pain; and 
 secondly, that if it suffered, pain was an unimportant 
 factor where progress is concerned." 
 
 "I said at the beginning," David said quickly, "that 
 the line must be drawn, is drawn, at experiments on human 
 beings. And I stick to it." 
 
 "Yet if the experiment had been carried out, if Vi had 
 been benefited by it, and not Vi alone, but hundreds like 
 her, would the doctor not have been justified ?" 
 
 David did not answer the question. "Are you invent- 
 ing?" she asked, "or was there such a doctor and such a 
 case?" 
 
 "That particular doctor and that particular child are 
 fictitious. The problem is an actual one." 
 
 "No ; because nobody dreams of experimenting on human 
 subjects." 
 
 "To that statement there are two replies: one is a 
 question, 'Why not?' The other is the fact that many 
 people not only dream of it. but do it." 
 
 "No," said David. "It's shameful to repeat these
 
 >I80 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 groundless anti-vivisectional calumnies. What authority 
 have you for such a statement ?" 
 
 "We'll leave my authority and the anti-vivisectional 
 calumnies for the moment, and take the question first. I 
 say, Why not? I know of no argument in favour of 
 vivisection which logically cannot be extended to the in- 
 clusion of human beings. Limit those human beings even 
 only to the degenerate, the criminal, the outcast; limit 
 them to those who are the terror and the curse of society. 
 If men are to be puinshed, why not punish them in a way 
 that will conduce to the well-being of their fellows ? Why 
 not inoculate them with the germs of disease ? The ortho- 
 dox medical world assures us that such inoculations cause 
 no more pain than a pin-prick. Why not send them to 
 places such as the research farms at Stansted in Essex, 
 instead of to a penal settlement ? If there is no immediate 
 pain, no after suffering, what is the objection? They 
 would really, if all that the vivisectors tell us is true, have 
 a high old time compared with what they go through on 
 Dartmoor." 
 
 "The objection is that one revolts from any sort of 
 experimenting on one's fellow-creatures." 
 
 "Yes; that's it; yes. There is no reason in your ob- 
 jection; it's pure emotional feeling. Emotion, sentiment, 
 should have nothing to do with the search for knowledge 
 (I speak as a scientist) ; yet you cannot eliminate them 
 (I speak now as an ordinary human being), because they 
 enter into all we do and think even into the attitude of 
 vivisectionists. Also they are amongst the factors which 
 prevent physiology from being or ever becoming an exact 
 science. For fear may vitiate experiments as sure as does 
 pain, and psychology affects physical function as well as
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 181 
 
 moral conduct. But your feeling? Why do you have 
 such a feeling?" 
 
 "It's a natural feeling to object to experiments on 
 fellow human beings." 
 
 "I don't see why, if it's an experiment which you be- 
 lieve would cause them no pain and much less discomfort 
 than they endure in a prison. The truth is that in your 
 heart of hearts you don't believe it. You really believe 
 that the experiments performed on animals do cause pain ; 
 in spite of the physiologists' assurances to the contrary, 
 you have an inward conviction as to the suffering entailed, 
 and you shelter yourself where animals are concerned 
 behind what is nothing more or less than a comfortable 
 fiction." 
 
 "In any case, whether what you say is true or not, there's 
 a difference between giving pain to a fellow-creature and 
 pain to an animal." 
 
 "The animal is dumb, and even more defenceless than 
 that large contingent of fellow-beings whom society, in 
 the form of sweating and in other ways, ruthlessly and 
 constantly oppresses. But the step from animal experi- 
 mentation to human experimentation is as small as that 
 between the sublime and the ridiculous. Which brings 
 us back to what you call anti-vivisectional calumnies." 
 
 "Calumnies," put in David, "which have been so often 
 repeated that they have become traditional, and are accepted 
 unquestionably by anti-vivisectionists as part of their stock- 
 in-trade." 
 
 "Excuse me a moment," Judy said. 
 
 She left the room, and David heard the frou-frou of 
 her skirts rustling down the stairs. Presently she re- 
 turned, carrying a handbag. 
 
 "I happen to have these extracts with me," she an-
 
 182 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 nounced. "Part of my stock-in-trade is direct evidence; 
 part of my business is to collect it." 
 
 She sat down by David's writing-table and placed upon 
 it a sheaf of newspaper cuttings which she took from the 
 handbag. "Do you challenge me as to the truth of my 
 statements?" she asked. 
 
 David nodded her head.
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 * T! HIS is from the Morning Leader," prefaced Judy. 
 A Then she began to read. " 'It has been dis- 
 covered that the physicians in the free hospitals of Vienna 
 systematically experiment upon their patients, especially 
 new-born children, women who are enceinte, and persons 
 who are dying. In one case the doctor injected the bacilli 
 of an infectious disease from a decomposing corpse into 
 thirty-five women and their new-born children. In an- 
 other case a youth, who was on the high road to recovery, 
 was inoculated, and he died within twenty-four hours. 
 One doctor who had received an unlimited number of 
 healthy children from a foundling hospital for experi- 
 mental purposes excused himself on the ground that they 
 were cheaper than animals.' ' n Judith laid down the piece 
 of newspaper. "In Austria there are no restrictions on 
 vivisection," she said. 
 
 "It's a falsehood," exclaimed David, "a newspaper fabri- 
 cation. I don't believe it." 
 
 "It's always open to you to take that view about any 
 evidence; and it certainly simplifies one's point of view. 
 I don't know whether you carry it to the extent of dis- 
 believing a man's own words?" 
 
 "Even a man's words may be twisted and turned so as 
 to distort their meaning." 
 
 "Even when the man has written them down himself?" 
 
 'App. 5. 
 
 183
 
 184i PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Judy took from her bag a periodical. "This," she said, 
 "is the Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital for July, 
 1897. The first article in it is one of a series of studies 
 on the lesions induced by the action of certain poisons on 
 the cortical nerve cell. This one is Study VII: Poisoning 
 with Preparations of the Thyroid Gland, and it is written 
 by Henry J. Berkeley, M.D., Associate in Neuro-Pathology, 
 the Johns Hopkins University. His opening paragraph, 
 by the way, is rather remarkable. He says that, with 
 very few exceptions, only the favourable results of the 
 thyroid gland extract are written about in the medical 
 press, and that, reviewing some of those results, it is safe 
 to say that they would have been as brilliant had no 
 medicament been administered. The italics," said Judy, 
 looking up, and referring to the emphasis she had placed 
 on the last words, "are my own. 'The first portion of 
 the investigation was made upon eight patients at the 
 City Asylum.' I think you can hardly call that a news- 
 paper fabrication?" Judy held up the paper. "You can 
 come and read for yourself if you like." 
 
 "Of course I don't want to read it for myself. You 
 are absurd." 
 
 "You don't want the details of each experiment, I sup- 
 pose? I had better summarise." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Out of the eight experiments, one was successful; in 
 all the others the patients suffered to no purpose (except, 
 of course, to prove that the treatment was fallacious). One 
 died; one became 'absolutely demented and degraded,' to 
 use the experimenter's words; all lost weight and became 
 mentally worse. 1 In America, also," remarked Judy, "vivi- 
 section is free from restriction." 
 
 App. 6.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 185 
 
 "You may find isolated instances of anything," said 
 David. 
 
 "This" Judy took up another paper "hardly sup- 
 ports that theory. It is the copy of a Bill, introduced by 
 Mr. Gallinger in the Senate of the United States, and is 
 called a Bill for the Regulation of Scientific Experiments 
 upon Human Beings in the District of Columbia. 1 I have 
 been told that when there is no restriction on vivisection, 
 the temptation to experiment on human beings is minim- 
 ised. What really happens is that callousness as to animal 
 suffering leads to callousness as to human suffering, too." 
 
 "Such things could never happen in England." 
 
 "Why not Is English human nature different from all 
 other human nature? I will send you round Dr. Sydney 
 Ringer's Therapeutics, and ask you to read the passages 
 I mark. For the moment, however, we will assume that 
 English scientists are made of different stuff from the 
 scientists of any other nation; and I will only draw your 
 attention to what unrestricted vivisection has led to in 
 other countries. This is an account of experiments in 
 connection with the spinal canal, performed and described 
 by Dr. A. H. Wentworth, senior Assistant-Physician to 
 the Infants' Hospital, Boston. They were performed on 
 children in that hospital, babies varying from four months 
 to three and a half years. 2 Many of them ended in death. 
 I have any number of things of the kind I could read you. 
 I have an account of experiments on six leper girls under 
 twelve years of age, who were inoculated with the virus of 
 a loathsome disease. 3 I have an account of Sanarelli's 
 yellow fever experiments, written by himself. 4 But I won't 
 ask you to listen to them, or to other instances, as bad or 
 worse. I will only ask you to listen to this one extract 
 
 J App. 7. *App. 8. App. 9. *App. 10.
 
 186 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 from an account written by Professor Schreiber, of Konigs- 
 berg. *I am sorry to say,' he says, 'that it is very difficult 
 to obtain subjects for such experiments. There are, of 
 course, plenty of healthy children in consumptive families, 
 but the parents are not always willing to give them up. 
 Finally I got a little boy for the purpose. My patient was 
 very susceptible to the poison. After I had given him an 
 injection of one milligramme, the most intense fever seized 
 him. It lasted three or four days; one of the glands of 
 the jaw swelled up enormously. I could discover no other 
 changes in the boy, who otherwise appeared healthy/ ' n 
 
 "The man was a brute," David said, as Judy paused. 
 "There are brutes everywhere, in everything. You can't 
 judge the honourable members of a profession by such 
 atrocities as these." 
 
 "Nor do I. There are hundreds thousands of men, 
 in the profession as well as out of it, who would condemn 
 such doings. Nor do I associate the bulk of medical men 
 in any country with the methods of the more famous (or 
 notorious) few. I don't suppose that any one can think 
 more highly than I do of the men who pass their lives in 
 what is considered the drudgery of the profession, whose 
 talents receive, perhaps, no recognition, their work no 
 reward, and who go on steadily, helping with their strength 
 and sympathy, their practical experience and knowledge, 
 to stem the tide of disease. But these men the vast bulk 
 of them know no more of vivisectionist practices and 
 reasoning than than you do. They accept vivisection 
 dogma with a faith which would be touching, were it not 
 at the same time criminal. Ignorance makes their bliss, 
 and few have the time, fewer the inclination, fewest, per- 
 haps, the enterprise to disturb that bliss by personal in- 
 
 'App. 11.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 187 
 
 vestigation. But now I want you to note something besides 
 what you term the atrocity of Schreiber's experiment; I 
 want you to note that an injection is not the momentary 
 and painless operation that we are assured by scientists that 
 it is. They talk of a pin-prick, soon over. So it is; but 
 the pin-prick itself is only the prelude to suffering which 
 lasts for days or weeks." 
 
 David did not answer; her thoughts were again with 
 Vi; her imagination, undeveloped in many directions, was 
 quick where the child was concerned, and she saw that 
 child in the hands of the Konigsberg professor. 
 
 Judy, divining the cause of her abstraction, was silent 
 for a while; but presently she turned to her papers again. 
 
 "Before we close this I don't know what to call it 
 discussion? conference? I want to I must point out to 
 you that though in America these cases I have instanced 
 were condemned by lay opinion, no single scientific society 
 has protested against such experiments. On the contrary, 
 some scientists have positively upheld them. One, writing 
 in the New York Independent, declares that 'A human life 
 is nothing compared with a new fact in science. . . . 
 The aim of science is the advancement of human knowl- 
 edge at any sacrifice of human life. ... If cats and 
 guinea-pigs can be put to any higher use than to advance 
 science, we do not know what it is. We do not know of 
 any higher use we can put a man to.' 1 There's another 
 writer who excuses human vivisections on the ground that 
 they are made for the good of suffering humanity. That 
 excuse has a very familiar ring about it." 
 
 "It could never happen in England," David said again. 
 
 When Judith had gone, she fled to the nursery. 
 
 "It could never be in England, it could never be," 
 
 *App. 12.
 
 188 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 she repeated, as she held Vi in her arms. "And the 
 
 rest " 
 
 All the animal suffering in the world seemed to her as 
 nothing compared to the well-being, nay, the possibility 
 of well-being, of her own little child. She hugged the 
 little one close. "It's because she doesn't know," she 
 whispered. "She doesn't know. She doesn't know"
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 " A ND now, Sidney, old chap," said Percy Burdon, 
 
 jLJL "I've got a piece of news for you." 
 
 The two men had dined, and had gone into Gale's study 
 consulting-room (it was sometimes called by the one 
 name, sometimes by the other) to smoke. A pleasant, 
 cosy little room it was, looking on to one of those tiny 
 back gardens in which London abounds. Dens of desola- 
 tion they often are, but may be spots where restfulness 
 hovers, and where beauty, in its lighter form of prettiness, 
 may be enticed to lodge. Gale's garden was pretty; and 
 restful, too. Very simple it was; just a space of gravel, 
 hedged round by shrubs ; and down the centre, great green 
 tubs in which, in their season, bloomed crocuses, daffodils, 
 and that unfailing friend of the London gardener, scarlet 
 geranium. It was trim and neat, for Gale rose early to 
 keep it so; and it was dear to him as the product of his 
 own hands' toil. 
 
 This evening the window overlooking the garden was 
 open, and by the open window a round brass tray, with 
 coffee and a tobacco jar, stood on a little table. For 
 Gale stuck to his pipe. Cigars, he maintained, were for 
 specialists. 
 
 "And I ain't a specialist, not yet, not by a long chalk," 
 he said, as he crammed the tobacco into his briarwood. 
 "Besides, a pipe's more companionable. Cigars ? cigarettes ? 
 
 189
 
 190 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Here to-day and gone to to-morrow? They're gone, by 
 Jove, just as you're getting on intimate terms with 'em. 
 But a pipe stands by you. And now, what's on your mind, 
 Percy?" 
 
 It was then that Percy made his announcement: "I've 
 got a piece of news for you." 
 
 Gale looked across at him, a smile in his yellow-brown 
 eyes. "/ know. You're going to get married." 
 
 "How the dickens " cried Burdon. 
 
 "A piece of news when a man's single always means 
 a marriage. The wonder to me is how you managed to 
 keep it in all dinner." 
 
 "Made up my mind I would." 
 
 "And Percy's mind," put in Gale, "is a devilish tough 
 thing." 
 
 "But I confess it was a struggle." 
 
 "I saw the struggle, but could not be sure whether you'd 
 poisoned an elderly patient or proposed to a young one." 
 
 "She's not a patient," said Burdon, with indignant pride. 
 
 "Keep your hair on, old chap ! I didn't mean to suggest 
 a chronic invalid." 
 
 "I do know people down there who aren't patients, you 
 know." 
 
 "Course you do; all the elite of the neighbourhood, I'll 
 be bound. Well, and what's her name?" 
 
 "Her name is Miss Mary Thompson. They they call 
 her Polly." 
 
 "They? And what do you call her?" 
 
 "Well, I call her Polly, too now. It seemed so 
 strange at first," said Burdon, with a sort of dreamy shame- 
 facedness. 
 
 "If I was going to get engaged to a girl called Polly, 
 Jove ! I'd get a parrot and practise on it," said Gale.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 191 
 
 "Oh, Sidney, you're just the same old rotter that you 
 always were!" 
 
 "Am I ?" Gale looked at his friend with a glance half- 
 laughing, half-rueful ; then shook his head evero slightly. 
 "Anyhow, I wish you luck," he said, "real, downright, 
 thundering luck. And there's my hand on it." 
 
 He stretched out his hand, and Burdon took it, and held 
 it a -moment, in a way that was almost a caress, in a way 
 that was typical of his attitude towards his friend. 
 
 "Have some more coffee," said Gale, edging away from 
 anything approaching to sentiment. 
 
 "No, thanks. I say, Sidney " 
 
 "Say on!" 
 
 "I wish you'd marry." 
 
 Burdon had not glanced upwards in the church that 
 day of David's marriage, as Mrs. Lowther had done, and 
 had not therefore seen Gale hugging his misery in the gal- 
 lery. He knew nothing of the extra shabby clothes which 
 Gale had donned, nothing of the very unkempt appearance 
 of his head, was uncertain, indeed, as to how far his cousin's 
 marriage had affected his friend. But conscious of the 
 false impression he had conveyed to Lowther, he had never 
 escaped from a sense of self-reproach, and was haunted by 
 an uneasy suspicion that his mistake had cost Gale dear. If 
 only Gale would marry his self-reproach would die down, 
 his uneasiness cease ; and now perhaps, in this confidential 
 hour, Gale would give him a hint that his heart was healed 
 of its boyish hurt by a love of more recent growth. But 
 Gale shook his head ; and so forcibly that his hair rebelled 
 successfully against the bondage imposed on it. by wet 
 brushes. He smoothed it into place again as he spoke. 
 
 "Not my line," he said briefly.
 
 192 PRIESTS OF. PROGRESS 
 
 "Nonsense. Why, you're cut out to make some woman 
 happy." 
 
 "If that's so, the woman and I haven't managed to get 
 introduced. But never mind me, old chap. Tell me about 
 Miss Polly Thompson. Why, man, you haven't mentioned 
 the colour of her eyes." 
 
 It was not difficult to get Percy to talk of his own affairs. 
 Polly's eyes were blue, he said, and her hair quite fair and 
 curling; in natural curls. "No tongs there," said Burdon 
 with chuckling pride. 
 
 "Tongs?" questioned Gale. His eyes turned towards 
 the fender. 
 
 "Curling tongs, you innocent; not fire-irons." Percy 
 laughed; then went on with a condescension born of su- 
 perior knowledge. "Most of the curls and waves you see are 
 done with tongs. Haven't you noticed when it's damp 
 they come out?" 
 
 "Lord!" said Gale, "so they do! In slums," he added 
 gravely, "they do it with curl papers. By the way," he went 
 on presently, "coming back from a slum to-day, I passed 
 Hall's old diggings. Heard anything about him lately ?" 
 
 "Oh, yes. Truth to tell, I'm rather fed up with Hall. 
 Every time I come up to London Uncle Bernard stuffs him 
 down my throat. He's this, that, and the other, going to 
 make a name and a career, and I don't know what all. 
 Well, he's clever, of course I suppose^ " 
 
 "Yes; much cleverer than you, old chap. Never mind; 
 I like you best. Well, what's he doing ? Still in Germany ? 
 He hasn't written me even the ghost of? a letter for I don't 
 know how long." 
 
 "ISTo; he's in Paris, at the Pasteur. Got a post there." 
 
 "I didn't know ; but it's quite his line. Suit him to a T."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 193 
 
 "David tells me Cranley saw him when he was over in 
 Paris in February." 
 
 " Ah ! Do he and Chance hit it off ?" 
 
 "Rather. Quite pally, I think. Hard lines about the 
 child, isn't it?" 
 
 "Very. She feels it terribly your cousin, I mean." 
 
 "She says very little about it to me." 
 
 "And nothing at all to me. Indeed, we very rarely meet. 
 But you can see it in her face." 
 
 "Can you? She looks very well, I think." 
 
 " Glad to hear it. I haven't seen her for some time." 
 
 "I suppose one gets used to everything." 
 
 "Possibly; or one stops kicking against it." 
 
 In Burden's mind the uneasiness stirred anew. Had 
 Sidney gone through a kicking process at the time of 
 David's marriage ? and had he ceased, not to feel, but just 
 to kick ? He stole a glance at his friend's face, but the face 
 was impenetrable. Gale's eyes were on the patch of garden ; 
 he was smoking steadily, leaning back slightly in his chair, 
 his legs crossed, and his right hand resting on the upper- 
 most knee. It was an attitude Percy knew of old, and gen- 
 erally meant that Gale was thinking. He, in his turn, 
 leaned back, and for a time both men were silent. Percy 
 was disturbed at first by self-reproachful qualms as to the 
 condition of Gale's heart; but his chair was a very com- 
 fortable one, conducive to reflection of a pleasing and tran- 
 quil nature, and soon his thoughts passed from that un- 
 toward interference of his (after all, it was ten years ago, 
 and Sidney must have got over it by this time, even if. there 
 had been anything to get over) to Polly, her blue eyes, and 
 her hair that curled without the aid of tongs. 
 
 Gale's thoughts were, as Burden's unquiet conscience had 
 at first suggested, with David, but not with the David of
 
 194. PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 ten years ago. He was thinking of her as he had seen her 
 last. To Burdon he had said that her face showed how 
 much she felt her child's illness : his thought to himself was 
 that she bore on her brow the crown of motherhood, and held 
 within her eyes the shadow of its cross. He longed to com- 
 fort her ; but it was characteristic of him and the feeling he 
 had for her that he shaped that longing into a desire to help 
 the child. Perhaps from the present his thougths wended 
 their way back to the past ; perhaps, thinking of her as she 
 was now, he contrasted her with the girl he first had 
 known; and from thoughts of that girl and the scenes in 
 which she figured, passed to less pleasant memories. His 
 first words, breaking a ten minutes' silence, were 
 
 "Remember Sarah Jennings?" 
 
 "Remember Sarah Jennings? Rather!" It was but a 
 few minutes since she had been uncomfortably prominent in 
 Percy's mind. 
 
 "I saw her the other day. I've always seen her, poor 
 soul, from time to time, but it was a good six months since 
 we'd come across one another, and I was beginning to think 
 she'd gone under " 
 
 "I should have thought she'd have done that long ago, 
 drinking as she did." 
 
 "She didn't drink; that's the answer. She got drunk 
 more than once at one time; but that's a different thing, 
 and I she stopped it in time." 
 
 "Good for Sarah. Well, what about her?" 
 
 "Oh, nothing much. She's married again, that's all. A 
 swagger marriage from her point of view." 
 
 "Not from yours?" 
 
 "Oh, I don't say that. And it's a great thing for her 
 to be provided for and the children. But, by God ! Percy,
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 195 
 
 there are some dirty sides to this scientific vivisection busi- 
 ness." 
 
 "What on earth has scientific vivisection got to do with 
 Sarah Jennings ?" 
 
 "Binney, she is now. She's married one of the men in 
 Bellows and Parr's, you know, the wholesale chemists; 
 and the husband I went down to pay a state wedding call 
 took me through the show, and I saw cocks with their 
 combs black with gangrene, and other pleasing sights; the 
 anti-toxin horses amongst them. Poor brutes!" 
 
 " You can't help it, you know. The stuff's got to be got, 
 and for the good of humanity " 
 
 "Oh, damn humanity!" burst in Gale. "Rhetorically 
 speaking, I say damn humanity !" 
 
 "Oh, I say!" cried Burdon, with round eyes. 
 
 "It seems to me that every blessed beastliness I come 
 across is said to be for the good of humanity. I sometimes 
 wonder" Gale was speaking more slowly now, and his 
 keen eyes grew a shade dreamy "if we shouldn't do more 
 for humanity, by trying to make it just simply clean. It's 
 precious dirty now, whichever way you look at it." 
 
 "The mass of people, all the lower classes, for instance, 
 are dirty, I suppose ; but " 
 
 "Lord, man, I'm not talking about the lower classes; nor 
 about the dirt that can be cured by soap and water. What 
 I mean is dirty blood, foul with all sorts of bad habits and 
 bad air and bad food." 
 
 "I don't know how you are going to clean it." 
 
 "I begin to doubt if we shall ever do it by pouring in 
 animal nastinesses. I begin to wonder whether, if we 
 preached clean living and clean feeding, we shouldn't do a 
 power more good." 
 
 "Good God, Sidney!" said Burdon, with a face of genu-
 
 196 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 ine consternation, "you're not going to turn into a crank 
 or a an A.-V.?" 
 
 Gale laughed. "Not to-night, anyhow. But look here, 
 Percy, I was talking, not long ago, to Herbert Snow, and 
 he told me that in all the years he has studied cancer he has 
 learned nothing, except from his clinical experience; that 
 any treatment which he has found to be of the slightest use, 
 palliative or ameliorative, has been the result of his clinical 
 experience. And more than tliat. Every theory advanced 
 by the Cancer Eesearch people he has found to be mislead- 
 ing, every remedy brought forward has been futile or worse. 1 
 These things make a man think. Especially when you con- 
 sider all the time and money and animals that have gone to 
 the making of the mistakes." 
 
 "Well, I shouldn't advise you to talk to David like that. 
 Any argument against research drives her wild." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "Because of little Vi. All her hopes are set on something 
 being found out that will do her good." 
 
 "Poor thing!" said Gale. 
 
 Presently he began to talk about the old student days, 
 and for the rest of the evening Percy's soul delighted itself 
 in laughter. 
 
 *App. 13.
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 SIDNEY GALE had a mind which was not made in 
 watertight compartments, but was constructed, so to 
 speak, in the form of one undivided tank. Disposed to 
 question, therefore, he could not limit inquiry; could not 
 shut off the probing faculty from certain subjects, while 
 he exercised it freely in others. But, looking round at the 
 men with whom he chiefly mingled, he found that what 
 was impossible to him was easy to them. Sceptical in cer- 
 tain directions, his professional comrades maintained in 
 others a blind faith. Questioning religion, morality, social 
 relations, even, occasionally, political institutions, they re- 
 mained, where conventional science was concerned, com- 
 pletely credulous. For Gale such mental reservations did 
 not exist; nevertheless, in the region of his profession he 
 held investigation in check; not complacently, as did his 
 fellows, but deliberately, half scorning the motives which set 
 shackles on his mind. 
 
 The motives were those of ambition; for at the age of 
 thirty-five ambition was the chief fiactor in Gale's life, 
 following on that love which had come almost as a religion 
 to his turbulent youth. That love still in a sense com- 
 panioned him, but was no longer dominant ; on the throne 
 of his being sat ambition, and imposed upon him the re- 
 strictions of expediency. He must restrain his scepticism, 
 stay his search for truth, lest, finding truth, he should find 
 himself at odds with all that makes for success, be com- 
 pelled to join the ranks of the rebels, the unorthodox. He 
 
 197
 
 198 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 knew well that, joining those ranks, he would run the risk 
 of substituting for success ignominy ; of losing his growing 
 reputation for ability, and finding that of a fool, a knave, 
 and probably a traitor; and knew that, eligible ostensibly 
 for every post of honour, he would, in fact, be debarred 
 from all. 1 
 
 Knowing all this, he was disposed to tread the safe way 
 that ambition pointed out: the way of limited logic, of 
 partial observation, of restricted inference; yet still was 
 haunted by an importunate spirit which suggested doubts 
 and propounded problems. 
 
 Hitherto he had been, so far as his profession was con- 
 cerned, what is called lucky. The little turns and chances 
 of life fell out to his advantage, and he had outdistanced 
 in the race for success many men who had started with 
 better prospects than his. Though to the circle of men who 
 divide the honours of the medical world he was almost 
 unknown, since his practice was general, and he had not at- 
 tempted to qualify for the prizes of the profession by vivi- 
 gectional experiments, amongst the men of his own standing 
 his reputation was spreading, and his opinion was con- 
 stantly asked for when the faith of patients or patients' 
 friends was not pinned to a prominent name. 
 
 It was, indeed, chiefly as a consultant that he was making 
 way, and the way widened, almost from month to month. 
 He lived now in Montagu Street ; he had a man-servant and 
 a brougham ; and though he had not for his wife the woman 
 who was his ideal of womanhood (and he would have no 
 other), ambition and the righting instinct which loves 
 contest for its own sake made work and striving and success 
 seem well worth while. 
 
 Yet, like all those who, with highly strung organisations, 
 
 'App. 14.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 199 
 
 have not reached the supremacy of balance which controls 
 or conquers moods, he had his days of darkness ; days when 
 the ordinary inducements to work had lost their compelling 
 strength; days when success seemed unattainable, or, if 
 attained, worthless. 
 
 One of these days followed an evening on which he had 
 dined with Judith Home. His fellow guests were few in 
 number; Judith's great friend Mrs. West was there, and 
 Miss Barker, and John Cameron; and besides these and 
 himself, only one other, a philosopher and scientist, well 
 known in Europe and beyond it. 
 
 The talk had been unlike most dinner-party talk. Be- 
 ginning with a certain measure of formality, resulting from 
 the fact that some of the guests were strangers to the others, 
 it had seemed to leap suddenly from the beaten track of 
 ordinary conversation into byways unusual and to Gale 
 entirely unexplored; byways which led to a region of such 
 strange experience, such vast suggestiveness, that Gale's 
 mind, used to the cramped speculation of a single science, 
 panted, as it were, in the rarer and radiant atmosphere. 
 Then, as he listened, his mind attuned itself, and passed 
 from bewilderment to elation, to understanding, to acute 
 interest. Suddenly it seemed to him that theories which in 
 days gone by Cameron had hinted at or propounded, and 
 which he intellectually had glanced at and dismissed, had 
 become not only brilliant hypotheses but probable explana- 
 tions of actual facts. In his work-a-day life he had rele- 
 gated his inherent idealism to the background of his con- 
 sciousness ; but now he was on a plane where ideals became 
 living possibilities; where heroism, self-sacrifice, love, in 
 their highest forms, were not poets' dreams but practical 
 duties; where the touchstone of morality was unselfishness, 
 and knowledge was not an acquirement but a gift. Gale,
 
 200 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 with something in himself that answered to the ideas put 
 forward, was roused to enthusiasm; it seemed to him that 
 his mind, his whole being expanded, and life was higher, 
 finer, more splendid than he had ever conceived it. 
 
 He went home in a state of exaltation, lifted out of his 
 ordinary self, raised above the ordinary world; and awoke 
 the next morning to a cold and blank reaction. All day it 
 held him, casting scorn upon the fervour of the night be- 
 fore, and robbing the daily outlook of interest. Walking 
 home about six o'clock, its grip was upon him still. His 
 soul that had soared high on the wings of its potentialities, 
 lay low in the grasp of its limitations; he was weary and 
 dissatisfied; oppressed by a sense of emptiness and un- 
 reality. 
 
 Then into his world of gloomy, half -formed thought there 
 broke a sound; the sound of a voice that he heard but 
 seldom, but always loved to hear. 
 
 "Are you quite determined to cut me?" it said. 
 
 Gale started, and life and life's interests rushed back 
 upon him in a flood. "Mrs. Chance!" he exclaimed. "I 
 never saw you." 
 
 "You were up in the clouds, I think." 
 
 "No, down in the in the drains, rather." 
 
 "What an unsavoury simile! You live in this street, 
 don't you?" 
 
 "Yes, just there, over the way." 
 
 "I'll walk with you to the door. I wanted to ask to 
 know if you had seen my mother lately." 
 
 "No, not quite lately. I've been I was going to say 
 busy, and that's true but I've been remiss, too." 
 
 "I wish you would look in sometimes. You're one of 
 the people she cares to see, and it cheers her." 
 
 They had reached Gale's door now and stopped before it.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 201 
 
 "You won't come in?" he said. 
 
 He expected an instant and decided negative, but it 
 seemed to him that David hesitated. 
 
 "Do," he begged, "do come in !" 
 
 Standing on his doorstep, he realised that the rooms 
 within the house were lonely, and saw hi a flash that were 
 David to enter them, they would be sanctified for ever after 
 by the memory of her presence. Just here she had stood; 
 had sat in that chair; had turned her eyes on that book or 
 picture. The vision was compelling. 
 
 "Do come in !" he said again. 
 
 "Well for five minutes." 
 
 There was still a faint hesitation in David's voice, but 
 her words were a permission to turn the latchkey in the 
 door, and in a moment the door was open. 
 
 It was Gale's turn to hesitate now. Should he take her 
 to the sitting-room upstairs? or he wanted so much to 
 feel that she had been in the room where he did most of 
 his work. But, after all, the study was to some extent a 
 public room, the room where he saw his patients, and into 
 the room upstairs few went except himself. He stood aside, 
 and made a sign for David to precede him up the staircase. 
 
 When she entered the sitting-room she stopped and said, 
 "Oh, how charming!" 
 
 "You like it?" 
 
 "Who could help liking it?" 
 
 The walls of the room, except those which were broken by 
 the windows and the fire-places, were lined with book- 
 shelves, beginning about four feet from the ground and 
 reaching to the ceiling; and below the book-shelves ran 
 seats, wide, low, and cushioned. On the red-painted floor 
 one or two rugs were spread ; in the front part of the room 
 stood a couple of comfortable arm-chairs and a good-sized
 
 202 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 table; in the back part, before the window, was a smaller 
 table; over each mantelpiece hung a picture. 
 
 "Come and sit down," said Gale, "and I'll ring for tea." 
 
 "No, no tea, please. 1 mustn't stay. I think I should 
 like to sit on that seat. May I ?" 
 
 She seated herself on the divan, near the window, and 
 Gale brought a chair to the other side of the window and 
 sat facing her. 
 
 "Yes, it's all delightful," she said, looking round, but 
 to Gale's quick perception it was apparent that her thoughts 
 were not in her words ; her eyes, momentarily meeting his, 
 seemed to carry an appeal. 
 
 Diffident in thought, he was bold in speech. "Is any- 
 thing troubling you?" he said, with a directness which had 
 always pleased her. 
 
 David coloured slightly. "Yes; a foolish thing, perhaps, 
 but it does trouble me." She smiled. " I believe that's why 
 I came in." 
 
 "Because I can help you?" An eager light sprang into 
 Gale's eyes. 
 
 "I when I saw you coming along the street, I fancied 
 you might. I think," said David, with some inconsequence, 
 "if one doesn't speak of things, they grow inside one into 
 importance when perhaps they are not important at all." 
 
 "I think they do." 
 
 "I've been seeing a good deal of Mrs. Home," David 
 went on. "I think you've met her?" 
 
 "Yes." Gale's thoughts went back to the previous eve~ 
 ning. "An interesting woman." 
 
 "Ye yes. Yes, she is interesting. And intelligent?" 
 Interrogation was but half developed in David's voice, 
 which divided statement with inquiry. 
 
 "Unusually intelligent."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 203 
 
 "Cranley doesn't like her." 
 
 "No?" 
 
 "That's why I can't speak about it to him." 
 
 "I see." 
 
 "You see she's a faddist; and Cranley can't bear fads. 
 No more can father. That is to say, certain fads. Of 
 course they have their own." 
 
 "Most people have." 
 
 "Now Mrs. Home's fad is just the fad that drives them 
 both mad." 
 
 "I see." 
 
 "I wish you'd you'd say something longer," said 
 David. 
 
 "I'll make a regular speech when I know what's the 
 matter." 
 
 David looked out of the window, then at Gale, then out 
 of the window again ; and then she began to speak, rapidly, 
 her words tumbling one upon the other as though she had 
 suddenly opened a door against which they had been striv- 
 ing for utterance. 
 
 "She's been talking to me, Judy has, and telling me 
 horrible things things than can't be true. And yet she 
 has proofs I can't sweep away. But they can't be true, 
 because they go against other truths things that I know, 
 things that are noble and pure, and that come before every- 
 thing else. I know I'm on the right side, the side that's 
 fighting against disease and suffering and death; and yet 
 the things she says haunt me. I can't get rid of them, I 
 can't answer them. I know there must be an answer, but 
 I can't find it." 
 
 David stopped speaking; her eyes were still upon the 
 street; she sat waiting; waiting, as Gale knew, for an an- 
 swer. That she should have come to him for that answer
 
 204. PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 touched him almost to pain ; the longing to give it was in- 
 tense. But the desire that filled his heart found in his 
 mind no adequate support. All the arguments which he 
 had used and had heard used in support of practices which 
 he instinctively disliked and deliberately condoned were 
 ready to his mental handling; but they seemed to him, in 
 the face of David's prayer for a solid ground of righteous- 
 ness, and in the faint reflection of the light which he had 
 glimpsed last night, sophistical and poor. What availed 
 it to speak of the good of humanity, when he knew, and she, 
 too, must know, or she would not be held by her present 
 distress, that humanity's chief gain lay not in the direction 
 of bodily ease, but in the perfecting of its spiritual nature? 
 What use to urge the paramount claims of material science, 
 when they both sensed, however dimly, that there were 
 higher laws which overrode those claims ? 
 
 David seemed to know what was in his mind. "Don't 
 tell me the ordinary things," she said, turning her face 
 towards him. "I've heard them all so often, from Cranley 
 and father. There must be something" she sought for 
 a word "something fundamental which reconciles right 
 with right." 
 
 "Or right with wrong," said Gale, and then wished he 
 had not said it, for the distress in David's eyes seemed to 
 deepen. 
 
 "It's Vi, you see," she said. (As if he did not know the 
 source of her trouble!) "There's nothing, there can be 
 nothing, purer, holier than a mother's love. Am I to deny 
 that love, am I to let my little helpless child go on suffer- 
 ing for the sake of of brute beasts ?" 
 
 Should he merely soothe her; just say "No," and soothe 
 both himself and her? To his sense of logic it was abun- 
 dantly apparent that if the dictates of a mother's love, or
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 205 
 
 any human love, were to be the test of morality, every 
 crime or cruelty, every meanness or treachery, would be per- 
 missible in the service of that love. But was it worth while 
 to talk logic ? Would he not merely add to her perplexity 
 by speaking his thought ? Then, looking at her, he realised 
 that though she had fenced with herself, she did not desire 
 to be fenced with by him ; and he told her what was in his 
 mind. 
 
 She listened with her eyes upon his face ; the interest in 
 them grew, but the trouble did not die. How should it, 
 when he gave her, not comfort, but sincerity ? 
 
 "You must just come back to what you call the ordinary 
 things," he ended; "there's nothing else. You must just 
 come back to the argument that man is higher than the 
 brutes, and that you must sacrifice the lower for the good 
 of the higher." 
 
 "Yes, I know," she said. "I say that to myself every 
 
 night after my prayers. And yet " David sat silent 
 
 for a moment, then rose. " I see you have nothing more to 
 say," she said. Her tone was almost resentful. 
 
 "Nothing that will be any good to you. I don't know 
 that there's anything that can be said in justification of 
 these things, except expediency. It's expedient, of course, 
 that people should suffer as little as possible and know 
 as much " 
 
 She held out her hand. "Thank you for letting me come 
 in, and for letting me bother you." 
 
 When she had gone Gale said to himself, "She asked 
 me for bread, and I have given her a stone. And it's the 
 only time she has ever asked me for anything; the only 
 time she ever will." 
 
 David, on her way to Manchester Square, was much of 
 Gale's opinion. She was regretting her visit; regretting
 
 206 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 that she had let this man, whom, after all, she knew so 
 little, look into the secret places of her heart. She had 
 acted on impulse. "And impulse," she said to herself, "is 
 sure to lead one wrong." If he had said anything that 
 would give her a surer foundation for her faith, it would 
 have been different; but he had given her nothing noth- 
 ing ! He had, indeed, but added to her uncertainty. Well, 
 one thing was sure : at home, in the nursery, Yi was waiting 
 for her, looking for her. 
 She hastened her steps.
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 1 
 
 IT was soon after David's incursion into Gale's house and 
 life that Cranley-Chance brought out his great book, 
 The Future of Man. The Press fell down and, in glowing 
 reviews, worshipped it ; the scientific world patted it on the 
 back; the semi-scientific public read it with an admiration 
 evoked partly by the gifts of the author, and partly by the 
 readers' consciousness that they were capable of appreci- 
 ating the profundity of his thought, the brilliance of his 
 theories, the width of his knowledge. 
 
 The book, indeed, was written to kindle the popular 
 imagination; it was an appeal to the public spirit to support 
 with the public funds the work, practical and speculative, 
 of science. Cranley-Chance was, in science, a cosmopolitan ; 
 he was acquainted with it in all its branches, was an expert 
 in more than one; and he summed up the achievements 
 of its different activities in able pages. On questions of 
 ascertained facts he was an authority; in the theories by 
 which he accounted for those facts, in the deductions which 
 he drew from them, he was not, great man though he was, 
 quite great enough to be, in all respects, entirely logical. 
 Starting with the assumption that man's knowledge has 
 become so complete that it is possible to establish a theory 
 of evolution of the cosmos, with special detail in regard to 
 the history of the earth and the development of man from 
 animal ancestry, he was nevertheless unable to lift that 
 
 l App. IS. 
 207
 
 208 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 theory altogether above the level of contradictory state- 
 ments. 
 
 To Cameron, to whom the period assigned for the course 
 of evolution by Chance and his peers was but as a day in the 
 aeons of sublime unfoldment, the contradictions seemed as 
 inevitable as they were obvious. To Gale, reading the book 
 without opposing theories of his own, but with a mind 
 equally keen in connecting the links of an argument and 
 detecting its flaws, they were disturbingly apparent. To 
 the mental observation of Percy Burdon they were not 
 visible. So long as he remained at Langborough in the 
 company of his Polly, he discoursed on the interest, the 
 ability, and the acute reasoning of the book to his and her 
 unblemished satisfaction; for Polly was one of the women 
 who take "an intelligent interest" in the pursuits of the 
 men with whom they are associated. 
 
 But it happened that Polly and Polly's mother came to 
 London on a week's trousseau campaign; and during that 
 week Percy twice made an excuse to come up by the after- 
 noon train and remain in town till the next morning. On 
 the first of these occasions he took Polly and Mrs. Thomp- 
 son to the theatre; on the second, Polly being engaged with 
 a godfather, he dined with Cameron and Gale at Gale's 
 house. 
 
 It was there that his enthusiasm over the book written 
 .by David's husband was, if not dauted, somewhat damped. 
 Old Cameron was a crank, of course, and would be ready 
 to find fault with every mortal thing from a theory to an 
 institution. But Gale, well 
 
 "We think so much alike on most things, you know," 
 said Percy, "that I I'm staggered to find you don't agree 
 with me about this." 
 
 "But I do agree with you ; old chap, up to a certain
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 209 
 
 point. The book's clever, and interesting, and plausible. 
 But it ain't logic in its main contention." 
 
 "Well, of course, you're a cleverer man than I am " 
 
 "Don't mention it," said Gale. 
 
 "But I'm blowed if I see what you mean." 
 
 "Well, he begins by saying that the modern scientific 
 definition of Nature includes the whole cosmos, and man 
 as part of it." 
 
 "So it does." 
 
 "Yes, so it does. I don't suppose even Mr. Cameron 
 wants to dispute that." 
 
 "When you deal with the cosmos," said Cameron, "you 
 can't very well leave anything outside." 
 
 "Good. But if man is a being resulting from and driven 
 by what Chance describes as the one great nexus of mechan- 
 ism which we call Nature, how can he defy the laws of that 
 mechanism? Even if he forms a new departure in Nature's 
 scheme, he is nevertheless still not rebellious, but obedient, 
 to that scheme." 
 
 "What I want to know," broke in Cameron, "is what he 
 means by spiritual emancipation. I know what I mean by 
 it myself, but seeing that he admits no factor other than 
 matter as he understands matter, what does he mean?" 
 
 "Oh, come," said Percy. "I didn't write the book, you 
 know." 
 
 "No," said Gale, "but you sort of went sponsor for its 
 logic; and I don't think the reasoning is satisfactory. He 
 says that the law of Natural Selection favoured the increase 
 of brain in a large ape and so man was formed. Well, take 
 it or leave it ; it's a theory, and the accepted scientific one. 
 But I object to the assumption that man, as soon as he be- 
 comes man, ceases to be part of Nature, is a rebel to Nature. 
 Jf he is the product of an orderly process how can he, at
 
 210 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 any point in that process, dissociate himself from it and 
 start a revolutionary process of his own ? The notions don't 
 seem to me to hang together." 
 
 "Unless," said Cameron, "you postulate in what Chance 
 calls the living matter which has given rise to man, an 
 inherent factor, originally latent, and developing in the 
 course of his evolution ; a factor either opposed or superior 
 to Nature or both ; a factor in any case necessarily super- 
 natural." 
 
 "He doesn't admit the supernatural," said Burdon. "He 
 distinctly says so." 
 
 "Precisely," agreed Gale, "which is why " 
 
 "Well, leave that for a moment," broke in Burdon. "His 
 main point is however he gets to it that the future of 
 man means the conquest of Nature, and that therefore to 
 return to Nature, as is advocated by certain schools of to- 
 day, to be her slave again instead of her master, is unreason- 
 able. I must say," said Percy, raising his wine-glass be- 
 tween his eye and the light, "I think there's something 
 in it." 
 
 "If you assume that anarchy is to supplant evolution, 
 and that the future of the universe is to be worked out by 
 the frustration of Nature's laws, there's a deal more in it," 
 said Cameron, "than is seen by you, Mr. Burdon, or even 
 by Professor Cranley-Chance." 
 
 "There are people who seem to think," observed Gale, 
 "that going back to nature means living in a cave without 
 your clothes on. You might as well say it meant going 
 back to the Miocene period. Nature to-day has other coun- 
 sels than primitive Nature gave to primitive man, and to go 
 back to Nature means to go to the Nature of to-day." 
 
 "Well, I should say that civilisation is against Nature/'
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 211 
 
 said Burden, "and it would be absurd to abandon civilisa- 
 tion." 
 
 "And I should say," answered Cameron, "that it is one 
 of Nature's processes, as relentless, in its superficial aspect, 
 as the process of natural selection." 
 
 "And what about disease?" 
 
 "It is the first result of man's rebellion against Nature." 
 
 "You admit, then, that he rebels." 
 
 "Certainly, but I deny that rebellion is the way of 
 progress." 
 
 "All the same," said Burdon, "I feel sure that Chance is 
 right. Having rebelled against Nature, we must master 
 her secrets and and resources, and progress by means of 
 science." 
 
 "All disease cured by sera," said Gale. "I don't know 
 that I'm prepared to swallow the serum doctrine whole." 
 
 "You can't test it properly, as things are. You can't 
 really test any scientific theory or pursue any discovery. 
 Chance says " 
 
 "I know," Gale broke in. "He advocates the support of 
 scientific research by the community that is to say, the 
 public funds." 
 
 "And I'm with him," said Cameron, "so long as the 
 research is strictly scientific, so long, that is to say, as the 
 means employed are legitimate." 
 
 "I don't know what you mean by legitimate," eaid Percy. 
 
 "I mean such means as, while advancing his material 
 knowledge*, do not delay his ethical development." 
 
 "I don't see what ethical development has to do with 
 science." 
 
 "Maybe not. You are not the only one who seeks to 
 put asunder things which are fundamentally joined. But
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 I tell you it can't be done. The two must grow together, 
 or man falls back and loses ground. If you look back " 
 
 Cameron's manner, dry hitherto, became, as he went on 
 speaking, more and more animated ; into his voice came the 
 Scotch intonation, into his speech the Scotch accent; his 
 eyes grew keener. Gale, looking at him, smiled. 
 
 "If you could look back," Cameron said, "you would 
 see that nation after nation, race after race, has risen to a 
 certain pinnacle of knowledge, attained a certain power, 
 and then perished. Certain evidences of this past great- 
 ness remain; more and more are being discovered." 
 
 "By scientific exploration," put in Burdon. 
 
 "Quite so; by legitimate and praiseworthy scientific 
 work. There was a civilisation before our own, immensely 
 greater than our own; the men of that civilisation knew, in 
 some directions, immensely more than the men of ours; 
 they had under their control forces of Nature which we 
 have not yet discovered, and forces which, having discov- 
 ered, we do not fully understand how to use. But AVC stand 
 on the brink of a vaster knowledge, and we shall know what 
 they knew ; for the knowledge that they had is the heritage 
 of all races. But we shall perish, too, as they perished, if 
 that knowledge is used for selfishness; if our leaders seek, 
 as their did, to get power and knowledge at the expense of 
 morality ; above all, if they succeed, as the past leaders suc- 
 ceeded, in creating a dominant hierarchy, mighty in knowl- 
 edge, exploiting the weak and the many in the service of the 
 powerful and the few. Cranley-Chance speaks of spiritual 
 emancipation. I don't know how he defines spirit. I define 
 it as that component part of man's being which determines 
 his place in Nature. The races have perished because their 
 leaders have put that spirit in thrall, because their love of 
 knowledge has turned to lust, because, ceasing to woo
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Nature, they have outraged her. It is in the ethical sense 
 that the spirit of man is made manifest : man's progress is 
 measured by his ethical development. I think, even, you 
 will find that it is by that standard that the world estimates 
 the nations." 
 
 "I don't know whether it is so absolutely," said Gale. 
 "You see, intellectual and ethical development generally 
 go together." 
 
 "Always, up to a point. Then, if they are separated, if 
 ethics are sacrificed to the desire for knowledge, to intel- 
 lectual curiosity for intellectual aspiration, divorced from 
 ethics, loses the element of reverence, of humility, becomes 
 curiosity; if ethics are sacrificed, I say, then comes de- 
 generacy; the decline, brilliant in achievement always in 
 its first stages, of the nation or the race. The cosmic law 
 is immutable ; and those who seek to break it, who seek by 
 violence, cruelty, by the dark path instead of the path of 
 light, to gain knowledge, power, things good in themselves 
 and desirable, will be by that law inevitably broken." 
 
 There was a short silence; then Percy, who did not feel 
 at home in the atmosphere which Cameron had created, 
 filled up his glass, sipped its contents, and, recovering him- 
 self with the sip, said, "I suppose what you're chiefly down 
 upon is the vivisection business?" 
 
 "Ethically, yes; scientifically I object to arguing from 
 animals to man, and to the whole system of attempting to 
 destroy the poisons of disease by pouring in more poison. 
 Of course, we all know you can render yourself immune or 
 partially immune to almost anything. The morphia maniac 
 can take doses of morphia that would kill the ordinary man, 
 and the drunkard can take at a sitting an amount of alcohol 
 that would poison the sober man outright. But the drunk- 
 ard and the drug-taker are ruining quite apart from their
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 individual bodies the health and strength of their de- 
 scendants; and the sera and the vaccines are lowering the 
 vitality of the race." 
 
 Burdon shook his head. "Well, I don't know. I have 
 great faith in science, and all the foremost men of the day 
 are in favour of these methods." 
 
 "The foremost men of many other days," said Cameron, 
 "have made mistakes."
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 THROUGHOUT the summer David and Gale met but 
 once again. Gale was calling on Mrs. Lowther, who 
 was Lady Lowther now, the doctor's baronetcy having been 
 amongst the last Birthday Honours. He went oftener to 
 see her since David had asked him to go, and during one 
 of his calls David came in. 
 
 She greeted him pleasantly, in what he called her Mrs. 
 Cranley-Chance manner, the manner she had assumed to 
 him since her marriage ; the intimate note which had crept 
 into her relations with Gale previous to the ill-fated tea- 
 party, and which had shown itself again during the inter- 
 view in Montagu Street, had altogether disappeared. She 
 mad no reference to that interview ; nearly two months ago 
 it was now ; and Gale received the impression that she did 
 not wish him to speak of it before her mother. 
 
 When he took his leave she followed him out of the room 
 on to the landing. 
 
 "I wanted to tell you," she said, "that I've made up my 
 mind, and that I've chosen Vi." 
 
 The look in her eyes was almost a challenge, but Gale 
 was in no way disposed to take it up. Was he not of her 
 way of thinking? and was he not glad to know that she was 
 no longer disturbed by doubts ? 
 
 "I'm glad your mind is at rest," he said, and answered 
 her look gravely. 
 
 He was very glad, he told himself as he went down tbe 
 
 215
 
 216 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 street. The memory of her face as she had asked him for 
 help had been with him often, and he had been distressed 
 to think that he had had no help to give. Now it was all 
 right; yes, all right, in spite of Cameron. "Are ye not 
 of more value than many sparrows?" quoted Gale to him- 
 self; forgetting or ignoring that the teaching of the 
 parable is not that the sparrows should be sacrificed to 
 man, but that man should learn of the sparrows to be less 
 eager in the pursuit of his own material welfare. 
 
 He, like David, had made up his mind. Ambition pointed 
 to the orthodox path ; and as for thinking things out well, 
 he had very little time to think. It may be that that time 
 was purposely, though perhaps not consciously, curtailed; 
 that he worked, that summer, unusually hard because 
 thought was unwelcome. In any case, he was unremittingly 
 busy, utilising what might have been his leisure in studying 
 the diseases of childhood as childhood exists in the slums. 
 
 He learned much ; more than he was, at the time, aware 
 of. He learned much in those swift work-laden days, be- 
 cause he studied, side by side with children's diseases, child- 
 hood ; side by side with childhood, environment ; side by side 
 with both, the effects of individual temperament. Un- 
 consciously but surely, his physiological conclusions, his 
 diagnostic observation, were tempered, broadened, modified, 
 by consideration of the psychological element which, con- 
 stantly ignored by physiologists, is inseparably connected 
 with physiology. 
 
 He became cognisant, too, not by direct investigation, but 
 by the unanalysed daily experience, the casual observation, 
 by means of which the facts of life are borne in upon most 
 of us, of many of the causes of disease ; of the seeds of those 
 evils which the leaders of his profession were attempting 
 to combat by studying the rottenness of the full-formed
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 217 
 
 fruit. He saw the monster Want, hydra-headed, each head 
 a vice or a disease, sucking away the future of the race; he 
 saw dry-breasted women, half-starved and over-worked, 
 feeding white babies, flabby or thin, on food unfitted, even 
 if pure, for infant stomachs, and largely made up, more- 
 over, of that adulteration which a great statesman has de- 
 clared to be one of the factors in the competitive system; 
 he saw and smelt rooms, alleys, districts whose foul at- 
 mosphere was charged with death rather than vitality. And 
 seeing all this, not of set purpose, but inevitably, thought 
 refused to be stifled, waxed clamorous, potent, argumenta- 
 tive, sequential. 
 
 What was medical science, to which the vast bulk of the 
 public bowed in unquestioning faith and reverent admira- 
 tion, doing for all these people? One or two of its prom- 
 inent men, to be sure, had lately pronounced against alcohol 
 and urged the necessity for hygiene, had sat on boards and 
 presided at committees : but were there any who had gone 
 to the root of the matter, so deep down as not to mistake 
 results for causes; to whom medical inspection was not 
 more important than improved conditions ; the coping with 
 disease not more interesting than the destruction of its gene- 
 sis? He thought of the laboratories and their work; labora- 
 tories all over the world in America, France, Austria, 
 Russia, England where men toiled, immensely patient, 
 indefatigably keen, thinking out, concocting, perfecting, 
 sera and sera and still more sera, till immunity should be 
 procured against all disease. Was it that way salvation lay ? 
 Was it so those tired women were to rest? those children, 
 tubercular, rickety, anaemic, syphilitic, to capture health? 
 Immunity ! "Great God !" cried the driven mind of Sidney 
 Gale, "have they not acquired immunity from much that 
 would kill the average healthy man? and does it profit
 
 218 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 them? Immunity from semi-starvation many of them 
 living on when a normal man would die; immunity from 
 foul air, in which, for more than a few minutes, I could 
 not breathe ; immunity from dirt. And what do they gain ? 
 Immunity in their case is paid for by degeneracy." 
 
 His mind, tentative still, but persistent, questioned : " Is 
 immunity, such as modern methods aim at, ever purchased 
 at a lower price ?" 
 
 He turned to surer ground. "Thank goodness!" he 
 thought, "for the rank and file of the profession, who harm 
 neither man nor beast; who go on steadily, day by day, 
 doing what good they can, bringing the help and hope that 
 a doctor who is worth his salt and hasn't mistaken his 
 calling always brings. Thank goodness!" he had almost 
 added, "that I am still of the rank and file !" But ambition, 
 slumbering awhile, roused herself now and spoke. In the 
 rank and file, she told Gale, he could not remain. Did he 
 not aspire, intend, to be a leader ? And those who rise, rise 
 not by rebellion, by independence of thought and action, 
 but by obedience to the tactics and the policy of the men in 
 the front ranks. Nay, even where he stood now he was not 
 on neutral ground ; for he could not get away from the new 
 treatment, the fashionable remedies, the modern methods; 
 could not get away from serumtherapy and organotherapy ; 
 and must either accept or refuse them. Deep within him 
 lurked doubt of the animal drugs, the animal poisons ; but 
 he would not recognise the doubt; and when it took vehe- 
 ment shape, ambition pointed to the diplomatic path. Win 
 your way and make your name, she counselled, ere you, 
 hardly a deacon yet, dare to attack the priesthood. Climb, 
 she urged, by the ladder you don't believe in, in order from 
 a commanding height to proclaim the truth. 
 
 Gale frowned mentally, stopped his ears to the contend-
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 219 
 
 ing voices, consigned doubt to the devil, and plunged deeper 
 into work than ever; exercising his brain so persistently 
 with the immediate problems of his cases, that he was too 
 tired to consider the deeper ones which underlay cases and 
 treatment alike. The summer was an unusually hot one, 
 and in the slums where Gale piled the Ossa of almost hon- 
 orary labour on the Pelion of his now heavy consulting 
 practice, smells were rife. His splendid health was proof 
 against heat, smells, and fatigue ; he toiled on, proud of his 
 own strength, immersed in the interest of professional ex- 
 perience. Nevertheless, when August drew to a close, he 
 became aware that his strength was flagging, his interest 
 less keen, that he needed respite, leisure, rest; and, with 
 the practical wisdom which ran side by side with his imag- 
 inative capacity, he decided to strike work and take a three 
 weeks' holiday in Switzerland.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 UP amongst the mountains Gale put his perplexities far 
 from him. He found it comparatively easy, in new 
 surroundings, to escape from the problems which pursued 
 him at home. Ordinary life seemed far away, half unreal, 
 hardly important. After the fashion of the true holiday 
 maker, he threw himself with zest into matters of the mo- 
 ment. He walked, he played tennis, he danced, he even 
 flirted ; or it would be truer, perhaps, to say, allowed him- 
 self to be flirted with. The girls and women who, by way of 
 a change, were amusing themselves abroad instead of amus- 
 ing themselves at home, were all disposed to be kind to Gale, 
 some divining the chivalry which was inherent in his na- 
 ture, others realising that, though quick to respond, he was 
 difficult to win, and finding attraction in the difficulty. 
 
 He enjoyed it all; the dancing and Gale's dancing, it 
 must be owned, was more vigorous than artistic the play- 
 ing at love, the games, at which he always wanted to win ; 
 not least, the long climbing walks with Percy Burdon. For 
 after he had been a few days at Caux, he saw, on coming 
 down to dinner, Percy and his bride seated at a table not 
 far from his own. Gale was afraid at first that his presence 
 in the hotel would seem to Percy like an intrusion on the 
 privacy of the honeymoon; but Percy soon reassured him. 
 He was a man who liked an audience, and his happiness 
 was enhanced by the fact that he could parade it, together 
 with his Polly's excellences and beauty, before his friend. 
 
 220
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "I feel rather a brute, you know," he remarked to his 
 wife, "flaunting our good fortune before old Sidney's eyes. 
 I'm afraid I rub it in sometimes too much; and being 
 well, as he is, you know, he's bound to feel rather envious 
 and forlorn." 
 
 "I dare say Mr. Gale could have had a wife if he'd 
 wanted^one," answered Polly. "I'm not sure he couldn't 
 find one here." 
 
 "Ah, but the right one?" said Percy. In his mind was 
 the old doubt as to whether he had cheated Gale of his 
 happiness. 
 
 "I can't say I think he looks like a disappointed man," 
 observed Polly. 
 
 "You don't?" 
 
 "Certainly not." 
 
 "Well, no, perhaps not; perhaps you're right." 
 
 "Everybody doesn't want to be married, you know." 
 
 "Poor, poor fools!" said Percy. 
 
 The walks that the two friends took sometimes kept the 
 husband longer away from his wife than he cared to be ; but 
 Sidney had never lost his charm for Burdon, who was too 
 glad of the chance of his companionship to forego the 
 expeditions they made together. Mrs. Polly was good- 
 natured, too, and urged him to go ; she was popular in the 
 hotel, and managed to amuse herself pretty well in his 
 absence. 
 
 Gale, on his side, was well suited with Percy as a com- 
 panion. For Percy was a man you could talk with if you 
 wanted to, and if you didn't, all you had to say was, "Hang 
 it, old chap, stop jawing for a bit. I want to be quiet." 
 
 Gale often wanted to be quiet when he got high up, into 
 the snow region ; to be quiet, and let the white stillness sink 
 into him, JJo weary questions came to vex him in those
 
 222 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 pauses ; the world and its complexities were too far away ; 
 in the keen, pure air, with the snow peaks all about him, 
 success and failure seemed not to matter. But sometimes, 
 in his spaces of silence, Gale thought of David Cranley- 
 Chance ; of her troubled face, of her suffering motherhood, 
 of her defiant eyes that last time he had seen her. He won- 
 dered where she was; in England, of course, for she never 
 went anywhere, he knew, where she could not take Vi. The 
 professor, so Burdon had stated, was abroad ; but Gale was 
 hardly interested in the professor and his movements ; only 
 in so far as Percy's statement caused him, in his thought of 
 David, to picture her alone, always alone, with the child 
 whose pain she could not ease. 
 
 When the picture grew too clear, "Percy, man," he would 
 say, "why on earth don't you say something?" and Percy, 
 only too pleased to be released from the bondage of silence, 
 would hold forth again. 
 
 Burdon, looking back upon these walks, remembered 
 them as being amongst the many joys of his honeymoon; 
 Gale remembered them as a white rest, apart somehow from 
 the light-hearted holiday-making at the hotel ; a rest which 
 braced and fortified him in his after struggle in the wilder- 
 ness. 
 
 Sometimes the friends spoke of that other friend who, on 
 the waves of circumstance, as it seemed, had drifted away 
 from them Edgar Hall. Gale was going to see him on his 
 way back. 
 
 "I thought of it, too," said Burdon; "but my wife was 
 at school in Paris and doesn't care for the place ; so we shall 
 go right through from Basle to Boulogne." 
 
 It was generally dusk when the two men got back to the 
 hotel ; Percy filled with delight at the sight of his Polly and 
 the warmth of her welcome; Gale not disinclined for fe-
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 male society, more numerous, though less devoted, than a 
 single Polly. 
 
 Little self-contained worlds are soon formed, separate 
 centres of joint life and common interests. Gale, like most 
 of his companions, was, after a few days, immersed in the 
 life of the Caux Hotel, in its politics, its projects, its news. 
 During his walks he went sometimes so far afield as to meet 
 David; and sometimes, when he was alone in his room, 
 David came to him; otherwise he lived altogether in the 
 little merry-making world about him. That world had its 
 great events, such as the private theatricals, stage-managed 
 and coached by a noted professional ; its tragedies, as when 
 Miss Bonar-Brown, pre-eminent at tennis, hurt her right 
 hand the day before the great match with the Vevey Club ; 
 its Daily Mail, not printed on paper, but circulated by 
 word of mouth. The Mail told the news and the scandal, 
 not only of Caux, but of Territet, Montreux, of all places 
 in the neighbourhood where news could be generated and 
 scandal manufactured. Usually this intangible publication 
 was flippantly scandalous or suavely censorious; occasion- 
 ally it was malevolent; now and again, melodramatic, as 
 when it thrilled its supporters by an account of the dog, 
 reputed mad, who had bitten two Englishmen at Lea 
 Avants. One had been bitten in the leg, through trousers 
 of tolerable thickness ; the other, on his bare hand ; and one 
 had started off at once for Paris to undergo the Pasteur 
 treatment, while the other had sucked his wound and re- 
 mained at Les Avants. 
 
 "How difficult to suck a wound in your leg," said some- 
 body. 
 
 "Especially if you're stout," said another. 
 
 "But he didn't," corrected the Special Correspondent.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "If s the leg one that's gone to Paris. The one who did the 
 sucking business is the one who was bitten in the hand." 
 
 "Oh!" This was in chorus, and then came solos, treble 
 and bass: "How rash!" "How foolish!" "How fool- 
 hardy!" "Tempting Providence!" 
 
 "He didn't believe the dog was mad, you see," said the 
 Special Correspondent. 
 
 "And was it?" 
 
 "Ifs been killed," said another member of the staff, a 
 lady who contributed paragraphs. 
 
 "And opinions are divided," said the Special Corre- 
 spondent. 
 
 "Well, I'm glad of it," said Miss Bonar-Brown, looking 
 at her finger-stall, and reflecting that there was nothing 
 so bad but that it might have been worse. "Supposing it 
 had come up here." 
 
 And then there was another chorus, the leit-motif of 
 which was, "How dreadful !" 
 
 Two days later Gale left the heights and depths of 
 the Grand Hotel world, and was whirled through the 
 darkness to Paris. 
 
 He had come to Paris for the express purpose of seeing 
 Edgar Hall ; he had looked forward to meeting him again ; 
 yet, as he puzzled out his way to the Pasteur Institute, 
 something that was almost like nervousness began to creep 
 in upon him. 
 
 It was some years now since he and Hall had met, and 
 previously to their last interview their meetings had been 
 only occasional and short; and "Chaps change," thought 
 
 Gale. Besides They had been intimate, of course, he 
 
 and Hall, in the old student days, and in the days when 
 they had first paddled, so to speak, in the ocean of pro- 
 fessional practice ; he and Hall and Percy had formed a trio
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 225 
 
 in friendship which had caused them to be commonly 
 spoken of amongst their, comrades as "the triangle." But 
 had the intimacy been more than a surface one ? or had they 
 been, he and Hall, not so much portions of a single chain, 
 inevitably adhering one to the other, as two chains of differ- 
 ent metals, joined by the connecting link of Percy Burdon ? 
 And besides, after all these years of separation 
 
 "Hot !" said Gale to himself. "Percy and I are different, 
 yet we're still pals, though we don't see much of each other ; 
 and why shouldn't it be the same with Hall ?" Yet, at the 
 same time, he could not help wishing he had written to Hall 
 to say he was coming. 
 
 His acquaintance with Paris was but slight, the acquain- 
 tance, that is to say, of the passing tourist, so that he had 
 to ask his way many times in order to reach his destination ; 
 but finally he found himself in the Boulevard Pasteur, and 
 then soon came to the Rue Dutot. The street is in itself 
 small and insignificant, but is distinguished in that it con- 
 tains two monuments, or two divisions of one monument 
 the original Institut Pasteur and the opposite building of 
 the Chimie Biologique to the memory of a Frenchman, 
 who is one of the most revered and admired, the most fa- 
 mous and widely known of his nation. 
 
 Pasteur, meeting at the beginning of his career with a 
 measure of opposition, incredulity, and contempt, was yet, 
 while he still lived, a prophet in his own country. He was 
 born, not out of due time, but in the very era when the 
 work that he did appealed most forcibly to the minds and 
 emotions of his fellow-men. The modern fear of death and 
 shrinking from pain were on the increase ; the modern spirit 
 of exhaustive inquiry was awake and keen ; the modern at- 
 titude towards physiology, an attitude which admits no
 
 226 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 difference, in the pursuit of knowledge, between insensible 
 matter and sentient organisms, \vas stiffening itself into a 
 principle. Pasteur, sigle-hearted, with ideals which were of 
 his age and not beyond it ; with a mind acute and powerful, 
 but of the kind which views particular pursuits apart from, 
 and not in relation to, the universe as a whole, achieved in 
 his work results which invited and received the homage of 
 his time. In his generation he was supremely wise ; in his 
 lifetime he received his reward ; he still sits upon a throne. 
 Yet that part of human nature ignored of physical science 
 may ultimately condemn the morality of his methods; the 
 growing experience of humanity may contravene his con- 
 clusions; science itself may happen upon that principle of 
 unity which forbids in the service of one portion of the 
 whole the violation of another. Throned idols have not 
 always a lasting divinity; it is the stoned prophets whose 
 words sound on through the ages. 
 
 A building of dark red brick, with plaster grown yellow ; 
 four windows on either side of the centre door, and a high 
 steep roof broken by another row of windows; such is the 
 Jnstitut Pasteur. It stands back from the street, divided 
 from it by a strip of garden wide enough to admit of a 
 carriage drive. 
 
 Up the drive went Sidney Gale, reverently ; for to him, 
 as to so many, the Institute was a temple dedicated to the 
 salvation of humanity. 
 
 Yes, Monsieur Ahl was there, in the Institue. If 
 Monsieur would wait a minute or two 
 
 "Certainement," said Monsieur, thinking how lucky it 
 was that there were some French words not so very far 
 removed from English ones. He had not long to wait in 
 the light and lofty room: presently Hall came in; Edgar
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 227 
 
 Hall, Gale knew him at once and yet a stranger. The 
 man who entered was small, below the middle height; 
 broad, but not lofty, of brow; with a pale face tapering 
 towards the chin. The nose was pinched, with suddenly 
 widening nostrils; the lips were thin, the eyes observant. 
 The expression was that somewhat absorbed one common 
 to men the force of whose intellect, the current of whose 
 interests, is compressed into a channel narrow and deep. 
 It was the expression perhaps that had changed in Gale's 
 student friend, for the features were the same, as was also 
 the figure, alert and spare; but it seemed to Sidney that 
 the whole personality had altered, and also that that per- 
 sonality had become more French than English. 
 
 "Gale! I could hardly believe my eyes when your card 
 was brought me. Sit down, please, my dear fellow. But 
 why didn't you write to say you were coming? I would 
 have contrived, or done my best to contrive, to have a spare 
 hour. And now I have but a few minutes." 
 
 "So busy, eh ? Jove ! you look as if you were working." 
 
 "I'm working very hard. This is the place to give a man 
 ideas; and the place to work them out in." 
 
 "All sorts of facilities, I suppose." 
 
 "The French are much more logical than the English. 
 If they found an institution, they provide everything to 
 carry on the work for which the institution was founded." 
 
 "Well, are you going to settle down here altogether?" 
 
 Gale was half joking, but Hall's answer came with com- 
 plete seriousness: "I hope so." 
 
 "Altogether? Be an exile?" 
 
 "Exile!" Hall's lip curled in the old way "A cosmo- 
 politan is never an exile." 
 
 "Always seems to me like a sort of Wandering Jew."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "Just the contrary. The Wandering Jew was never at 
 home; the cosmopolitan always is." 
 
 "I'll take your word for it. And so you're a cosmo- 
 politan?" 
 
 "Science is cosmopolitan, and I'm a scientist." 
 
 "I see. Well, look here, you're busy now, you say " 
 
 "So sorry," murmured Hall. 
 
 "Come and dine with me this evening and we'll have a 
 regular good old gossip." 
 
 "Excuse me; in Paris, / am host. Meet me at Frederic's, 
 Quai de la Monnaie, at seven-thirty. I'll ask one or two 
 men you'll be interested to meet." 
 
 "Awfully good of you, but look here, don't trouble to 
 ask a lot of other fellows. What I'd like " 
 
 "Not at all, not at all; no trouble. I should like you 
 to meet them." 
 
 Then, in a twinkling, as it seemed, Gale found himself 
 in the street again. "Because I'm on a holiday, I can't 
 expect all the other chaps not to be busy," he thought, as 
 he went back towards his hotel. "All the same, I'd like to 
 have seen through the place." Disappointed he was not, 
 he told himself, since he had two or three days to spend 
 in Paris, and he could see through the Institute to-morrow 
 or next day. But Hall was changed certainly. Changed 
 had he, though or simply developed? "He was always a 
 rum, cool sort of chap, even in the days when I used to sit 
 upon him," reflected Gale. "Now, by Jove! he's inclined 
 to sit upon me. Wonder how he and Percy would hit it off ? 
 Percy was always thicker with him than I was. Wish he 
 hadn't asked those Frenchies. Such a bore talking their 
 jabber." 
 
 Yet he was dimly conscious that a tete-a-tete dinner with 
 Hall might- not be altogether so enjoyable as he had picture^
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 229 
 
 it in the train from Geneva; there were threads dropped in 
 the past, not to be picked up by the present Edgar ; perhaps, 
 after all, the presence of other guests was not entirely to be 
 deplored.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV 
 
 OF the half-dozen men whom Edgar Hall presented to 
 Gale that evening, five were well known in Paris, 
 and the names of three were familiar to Gale through the 
 medium of medical journals. One of these names belonged 
 to a German, known in Paris, as in London, by reputation, 
 and one to a man who came from the south of. France. Gale 
 himself was the least distinguished man of the party, and 
 Gale, as has been indicated, was not, in his own country, 
 entirely unknown. The least distinguished he was in re- 
 gard to fame, yet his face, with its strong vitality, its keen 
 eyes, and its frame of tawny hair, was perhaps the most ar- 
 resting of those gathered round the restaurant table. David 
 Chance, when she had been David Lowther, had said once 
 that Mr. Gale had the face of a predestine; and it is true 
 that there was in Gale's face, mingled indescribably with 
 the vividness of its expression, that elusive melancholy, 
 often to be observed in the faces of those destined to early 
 death, to the endurance of heroic disasters, or to the silent 
 tragedy of failure. 
 
 At first the conversation was not general, and Hall, see- 
 ing that his guests were occupied with each other, spoke to 
 Gale in English. 
 
 "By the way," he said, "who do you think is under 
 treatment at the Institute just now?" 
 
 "Never was good at guessing." 
 
 " Cranley-Chance." 
 
 880
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 231 
 
 "Cranley-Chance? By Jove! What on earth has hap- 
 pened to him ?" 
 
 "He was bitten by a dog in Switzerland, it seems. He 
 was travelling with Carey you know Carey?" 
 
 "Sir James of that ilk?" 
 
 "Yes; and they were both bitten." 
 
 "Not at Les Avants, by any chance?" 
 
 "Yes, it was. Chance took the first train through." 
 
 "Why, I was quite close there, and heard all about it. 
 Fancy it's turning out to be those two! If I'd known, 
 I'd have gone down and seen Carey. He stayed on where he 
 was, I hear." 
 
 "Chance says he came to the Institute partly for the 
 example." 
 
 "Good old Chance! Was he badly bitten?" 
 
 Hall shook his head. "Not he; the skin wasn't even 
 broken. I'm not sure, if I'd been him, I shouldn't have 
 followed the other chap's example and sucked the wound." 
 
 "He couldn't do that," said Gale, "if there wasn't a 
 wound to suck. How's he going on?" 
 
 "Oh, all right; the thing's taking the normal course. 
 It makes you uncomfortable, of course, for a time." 
 
 Hall turned to the man on his left, and Gale was left to 
 try and ctch scraps of the talk going on about him. 
 
 Presently the talk became general, but Gale, whose ears 
 received French without difficulty, but whose tongue was 
 not fully master of it, listened at first considerably more 
 than he spoke; listened with both diffidence and interest, 
 for these were famous men, and their ideas and opinions 
 carried weight; listened till interest overpowered diffidence, 
 overpowered the* disabilities of speech in a foreign tongue, 
 overpowered all but the imperative necessity of saying what 
 was in his mind. But this stage was not reached till the
 
 232 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 dinner was over, and coffee, liqueurs, and cigars had taken 
 its place. Gale smoked but little now. He found that to- 
 bacco as well as alcohol interfered with the steadiness of his 
 hand and nerve, and had sacrificed both to the perfection 
 of his surgical work. At home he smoked one after-dinner 
 pipe ; to-night he played with cigarettes while his host and 
 fellow-guests puffed at cigars. 
 
 The talk turned naturally to what is called "shop," and 
 discussion waxed keen. There were rival theories on many 
 points; experiments pointed to different conclusions; and 
 the as yet unreached solutions of various problems were the 
 subjects of contradictory prophecies. Gale was struck with 
 the deference accorded to Hall. He not only spoke as one 
 having authority ("that was always rather his way") but 
 was listened to on the same basis; it was obvious that he 
 was a much bigger man than his student friend had im- 
 agined. It was Hall who finally kindled the fire which, 
 smouldering through Gale's musing as he listened to the 
 eager talk about him, caused him at last to speak with his 
 language-hampered tongue. 
 
 The fire first began to smoulder during the narration of 
 certain experiments. Vivisectors are not cruel, the public 
 is told; and if by cruelty is meant that the infliction of 
 pain is in itself pleasing to the inflictors, cruel they are 
 not; but if by cruelty is meant an utter indifference as to 
 whether pain is or is not given, a disregard of suffering if 
 suffering be necessary to prove a certain point, of cruelty 
 the large majority of them must undoubtedly stand con- 
 victed. It was the cold callousness of his fellow-guests 
 which first stirred the burning in Gale's heart; living or- 
 ganisms were not other to these men than geological speci- 
 mens; their only care obviously was that the subject of their 
 experiments should be motionless, and so not interfere with
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 233 
 
 the success of their investigations. But as yet he kept 
 silence. His pulses stirred, but the consciousness of his 
 imperfect French still held him. 
 
 "Yet," said h docteur Detaille, "all this experimenting, 
 interesting as it is,' is abortive, unsatisfactory. The only 
 decisive proof, the final experiment, must be always in 
 connection with the human being." 
 
 "Exactly," agreed Beauregard. "Such a method might 
 be perfect if one were concerned exclusively with the pa- 
 thology of the guinea-pig or the rat. It may be defective if 
 one argues from animals to man. In any case it is inade- 
 quate." 1 
 
 "I am quite of your opinion," said Professor Leibholtz; 
 "but in our country we not only hold opinions, we act 
 upon them, and if you are logical, you must admit that, if 
 the end is all important, every means of arriving at it is 
 defensible." 
 
 "Certainly; but public opinion " 
 
 "Oh, public opinion !" The Viennese shrugged his shoul- 
 ders. " Sometimes the Press spurts out some humanitarian 
 cant, but we are not interfered with. We command the 
 hospitals, and the outside public is, as a whole, indifferent." 
 
 "There was trouble over the Doyen business," observed 
 Gale. 
 
 "Doyen of Rheims and his cancer-grafting? 2 Yes, all 
 Europe professed to be interested ; but it died down, it died 
 down. Certainly the German Press is not universally hos- 
 tile. I remember reading in the Vossische Zeitung the 
 argument that as a general sends a regiment to certain 
 death to gain the victory for the rest of the army, so a 
 doctor should be allowed to act in a similar way." 
 
 "The sentiment seems to me to tell more against war 
 
 >App. 16. *App. 17.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 than in favour of human- vivisection," said Gale in his 
 halting French; and everybody laughed; not at his French, 
 since foreigners are rarely amused, or rarely show their 
 amusement, at the language blunders of strangers, but be- 
 cause his remark was supposed to be the Englishman's 
 idea of a joke. Everybody laughed but Hall, and he, know- 
 ing that Gale had no intention of joking, frowned. 
 
 "Do you think that Schreiber did much for humanity by 
 his injections of Koch's tuberculin into new-born chil- 
 dren ?" asked Giraud. He was the man from the provinces, 
 and had not spoken much. 
 
 "I cannot quite recall the experiments." 
 
 "He injected fifty times the maximum dose prescribed by 
 Koch into forty new-born infants." 1 
 
 "I do not remember the results. But no doubt he gamed 
 knowledge. It is, as Monsieur Beauregard has remarked, 
 the only sure method." 
 
 "Is it the general practice in your country to use the 
 hospitals as centres of investigation?" asked Gale. 
 
 "In most hospitals, I should say, patients are made use 
 of in the cause of science. And not in my country alone. 
 1 think you will find this sort of thing is carried on in 
 Berlin and Paris and also in London." 
 
 "Not in Lon " began Gale, and stopped short. Had 
 
 not Sarah Jennings been made use of ? 
 
 "Ringer undoubtedly experimented on his patients," 2 
 said Hall, "and I think myself that a man is justified in 
 getting some return for the time and skill he gives with- 
 out payment, especially as the sacrifice of the few is for 
 the advantage of the many. But in England, in the present 
 state of public opinion, acknowledged experimentation 
 would not be tolerated. Though it is just in England, 
 
 J App 18. 2 App. 19.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 235 
 
 where science is hampered by the canting outcry of anti- 
 vivisectionists, that men are likely to be tempted to gain 
 their knowledge from the human subject." 
 
 "On the other hand, it is possible," said Giraud, "that 
 if that outcry ceased, if experiments on animals were unre- 
 stricted, that the result might be to introduce or increase 
 human experiments to the extent which prevails in coun- 
 tries where there is no restriction." 
 
 "Hein!" Everybody turned to the speaker. 
 
 "My friends," said Giraud. He was a massive man, big 
 in body and in feature ; his eyes, of a dark, dull grey, were 
 deep set beneath a wide high brow. "My friends, I am 
 not sure whether we are not all wrong, whether the course 
 we have followed so assiduously has- not brought us as much 
 error as knowledge ; whether the system- we have evolved of 
 injecting disease to procure health* is not a false one. I 
 have been a persistent experimenter, as you all know, and 
 enthusiasm in the cause of science I may say in the 
 cause of humanity has carried me* unflinchingly through 
 everything which seemed to promise any new light on the 
 problems with which we cope. But I ask myself, after 
 thirty years' work not mine alone, but the work of hun- 
 dreds of others what have we done? Are people better? 
 Is the race stronger? Has disease decreased? To all these 
 questions I must answer, No." 
 
 "But knowledge " 
 
 "But science " 
 
 "But the surgical art " 
 
 Giraud raised a large hand. 
 
 "Pardon. I know all you are going to say; I have said 
 it many times to myself. It does not answer in the affirma- 
 tive those questions I have asked. As for the knowledge 
 gained, is it more than academic ? As for practical knowl-
 
 236 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 edge I tell you that when students come down from tKe 
 Paris hospitals and are faced with ordinary illnesses, they 
 are helpless. They know nothing of diagnosis, nothing of 
 initial symptoms ; they can inoculate and they can carve 
 that is all. Their clinical work they have to learn." 1 
 
 "You have not become a renegade, by any chance?" 
 asked Beauregard. 
 
 "No, only a thinker." 
 
 "A dreamer perhaps," suggested a small, dark man called 
 Loret. 
 
 "No, but a free thinker." 
 
 "As for me," said Michelin, one of the best known men 
 present, "I am not afraid to avow myself a dreamer. I 
 dream of what may be and also of what shall be." 
 
 "Is it permitted to ask how you make your division?" 
 asked Loret. 
 
 "Certainly. What may be is that we may discover the 
 principle of life itself " 
 
 "And they call me a dreamer!" muttered Giraud. 
 
 "That is to say, we may be able to solve the problem, 
 compared with which all other problems are insignificant 
 and preparatory only: how do nervous impulses so flit to 
 and fro within the nervous system as to issue in the move- 
 ments which make up what we sometimes call the life of 
 man ?" 2 
 
 "Monsieur," said Giraud, "the principle of life will 
 never be discovered through the practice of pain." 
 
 "For my part," said Detaille, "I am not concerned with 
 the nature of life. My aim is to prolong it." 
 
 "And mine," agreed Hall. "I am with Monsieur Miche- 
 lin only as regards what shall be." 
 
 *App. 20. *App. 21.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 237 
 
 "And you think it will be possible to discover a means 
 of extending life beyond its normal limits ?" asked Giraud. 
 "Undoubtedly," said Hall and Detaille together. 
 "By eliminating disease," said Michelin, "or, what is the 
 
 same thing, by providing an antidote to every disease m 
 
 "Pardon me," broke in Giraud, "the two things are not 
 the same. A child who has never had diphtheria is a much 
 healthier child than a child who has passed through the 
 disease and the anti-toxin treatment. Those who have 
 escaped both vaccination and small-pox have a surer and 
 greater vitality than those who have been subjected to 
 either. That must be allowed." 
 
 "Then how, pray, may I ask, are you going to stamp out 
 disease ?" 
 
 "That, Monsieur, is a question which is not likely to be 
 answered so long as the intellect of the profession is en- 
 grossed by the present methods." 
 
 "But according to the intellect of Monsieur, which is 
 not so engrossed?" questioned Loret. 
 
 "It has occurred to me that it might be by the cultiva- 
 tion of health," answered Giraud; and met the storm of 
 derisive dissent with unmoved countenance. 
 
 "There are diseases so rooted in the race," began Detaille. 
 "In civilised races," put in Gale. Giraud looked at him 
 across the table, and said : 
 " Parf aitement." 
 
 "In civilised races if you will," continued Detaille, "that 
 only science can stamp them out." 
 
 "In conjunction," amended Giraud, "with nature." 
 "And is not science perpetually engaged in the study of 
 nature?" asked Michelin. 
 
 "I am not sure that science physiological science has 
 
 J App. 22.
 
 238 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 not become the bully rather than the pupil of nature," an- 
 swered Giraud, and again evoked a storm of inarticulate 
 dissent. 
 
 "He is incorrigible," said Detaille, and Giraud answered 
 him only with a slow smile. 
 
 "The barrier to our complete success consists in the lim- 
 itations imposed upon us," affirmed Beauregard. "It is a 
 fact that there is an unbridgable gulf between the animal 
 and human kingdoms, and results ascertained in the one 
 remain problematical in the other. The inadequacy of ex- 
 periments upon animals only is indisputable when you 
 consider that there are certain maladies peculiar to man 
 alone, and that some of them cannot be reproduced in 
 animals." 
 
 "As, for instance?" added Hall; and Beauregard named 
 the unnameable disease. 
 
 "As yet," Hall conceded, "we have failed." 
 
 "And you will never succeed," said Leibholtz. "Believe 
 me, the only sure material for the experiment is the human 
 subject. And such material is not difficult to obtain. I 
 myself inoculated eight girls with the malady under dis- 
 cussion, and obtained most interesting results. 1 That is 
 much better than wasting your time trying to reproduce in 
 animals diseases exclusively human." 
 
 It was then that Gale forgot both himself and his im- 
 perfect command of the French tongue. "You did that?" 
 said he. "Well, I call it devilish." The badness of his 
 French somewhat obscured the expression of his feeling, but 
 his face spoke, while the bang of his hand upon the table 
 formed a language that all could understand. The face of 
 the Viennese professor assumed an expression of affronted 
 
 'App. 23.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 239 
 
 displeasure; on the other faces surprised inquiry was the 
 feeling chiefly displayed, Giraud regarded the excited 
 Englishman with a sort of reflective sympathy. 
 
 "Don't make an ass of yourself," said Hall quickly, in 
 English, "or of me. My friend," he continued in French, 
 "is not accustomed to converse in any language but his 
 own, and is unable to choose his expressions. In England, 
 as you know, there is a widespread feeling against experi- 
 menting on human subjects, and Mr. Gale sides with the 
 bulk of his professional country-men. Did he speak French 
 as well as you do, professor," he said, turning to the Ger- 
 man, "he might be able to argue the subject with you. But 
 I," he went on, "will show you all that if experiments on 
 man are not superfluous, it is nevertheless possible to dis- 
 cover an antidote to this scourge of the race by means of 
 the animal world." 
 
 "But animals cannot be infected with it," said two men 
 together. 
 
 "As yet all animals have proved immune even monkeys. 
 But I am convinced that amongst monkeys there must be 
 certain species in which it could be engendered. Gentle- 
 men, I propose to devote myself to the discovery of the 
 particular species and the particular method." 
 
 Then the fire already kindled in Gale leapt up in flame. 
 He sprang to his feet. "It's the damnedest idea I ever 
 heard of," he cried. "To take the brutes that are by nature 
 pure, and deliberately infect them with man's impurity ! If 
 that is science, may science go to the devil and you, Hall, 
 with it !" 
 
 For a minute every eye was upon Gale; waiters, cus- 
 tomers, everybody in the place looked at the tall English- 
 man with the shining eyes, and the mane of hair, shaken 
 out now to its wildest extent; and for a moment Gale's
 
 personality dominated the situation. His fellow-guests 
 were held by it ; abashed for the moment ; unable to decide 
 whether to be angry, scornful, or amused. Then, as the 
 vehement instant passed, there succeeded to it a short un- 
 comfortable space in which nobody quite knew what to do. 
 
 Gale himself put an end to the tension. "Je vous de- 
 mande pardon, messieurs," he said simply in his English- 
 translated French, "d' avoir interrompu 1'harmonie de la 
 soiree; mais j'ai connu Hall quand il etait etudiant, et si 
 je n'avais pas dit cela, je serias creve." 
 
 "Then I congratulate you on having spoken," said 
 Giraud. "As for me, I like an honest man, and I am sure 
 these gentlemen are of my opinion." 
 
 "These gentlemen" bowed, but the party had come to an 
 end; and presently, in ones and twos, the guests took their 
 departure. 
 
 When Hall and Gale found themselves alone Gale turned 
 to his host. 
 
 "I'm sorry," he said. "Of course, you were not serious ; 
 and I I was too British to see it. I have made an ass of 
 myself. The only consolation is, I don't suppose I shall 
 ever see any of those chaps again." 
 
 "But I shall," said Hall with rueful displeasure. 
 
 Then Gale laughed, and, "Thank God!" said he, "my 
 sense of humour's coming back to me."
 
 CHAPTER XXXV 
 
 DAVID stood at the nursery window and looked out 
 into Manchester Square. 
 
 The troubled look that had haunted her face all summer 
 had gone ; the look that had escaped her husband, had been 
 noted by her mother, had impressed itself on Gale's ob- 
 servation the day she had come to his house. The irreso- 
 lution and questioning had gone; David's face had fallen 
 back into its old decided lines, because David's mind was 
 made up. The training of her girlhood, the mental atmos- 
 phere of her married life, had had their effect, and the 
 mother's love which was to her the touchstone of morality 
 had been an overwhelming weight in the scale of her de- 
 cision. That decision arrived at, she had refused to con- 
 sider any more Judy's arguments or her own misgivings; 
 doubts had been dismissed, scruples banished; and the 
 vivisectionist plausibilities of anaesthetics, absence of pain, 
 advantage to science, and benefit to humanity were glib on 
 her tongue. 
 
 And recently she had been strengthened in her attitude, 
 since recently she had had practical, almost personal, proof 
 of the efficacy of one, at any rate, of the discoveries of 
 vivisectional science. For Cranley had come back from 
 Paris well and strong, saved from the consequences of what 
 might have proved a tragic accident, had not the Pasteur 
 Institute been ready to receive him. If the dog had really 
 been mad and it was impossible now to know it was 
 
 241
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 horrible to think what that slight graze of the skin might 
 have entailed, had not the antidote been discovered. Sir 
 James Carey, to be sure, was well, too so far ; but the peril 
 was not yet over, and were she Lady Carey, she would never 
 feel comfortable. 
 
 Yet, though David's face was calm and her mind free 
 from doubt, that pain which Gale had called the martyrdom 
 of motherhood was still a sorrow in her heart, a cloud in 
 her eyes. For Vi was no better. The disease developed as 
 time went on, and science, so far, had been powerless to 
 arrest it. Cranley-Chance, in that laboratory where he had 
 made his name, had been working now three years to find 
 a means of salvation. Experiment had followed experi- 
 ment, and animal after animal had been sacrificed on the 
 altar of Vi's possible recovery; yet nothing had been dis- 
 covered that was of any use ; and Vi grew worse. That the 
 disease was making progress David was hardly aware ; cus- 
 tom, which blinds most vision, dulled her watchful eyes ; and 
 to her, Vi, constantly prostrate now, becoming ever more 
 helpless, ever more suffering, seemed always much the same. 
 So much indeed does custom deaden not only sight but feel- 
 ing, so much does human nature acommodate itself to the 
 environment, that David, miserable when the child was 
 first taken ill, was now often merry. The thought of Vi 
 and of Vi's suffering was rarely altogether absent from her 
 consciousness; but continued depression was impossible to 
 a nature naturally so buoyant as hers, and there were days 
 when she was as gay as in her girlhood. 
 
 To-day was one of those days; standing at the window, 
 looking out at the leafless trees, her heart was light. She 
 stood drumming on the window-pane, whistling a little tune 
 (Vi liked to be whistled to), and was turning away to cross 
 the room to the child when a servant brought in a note.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 243 
 
 "It's from gran'pa, Vi," said David, opening it. "He 
 wants me to go with him to-morrow night to a play. I 
 must just go and write him a note, dear." 
 
 "Of course I shall love to go with "you," she began to 
 write, and then stopped short. "Oh, dear! how tiresome," 
 she was thinking; "to-morrow is that horrid old soiree at 
 the Eoyal Institution, and Cranley expects me to go with 
 him. I wonder I wonder if he would let me off?" 
 
 She went downstairs to the hall. 
 
 "Tell Sir Bernard," she said to the man who was wait- 
 ing, "that I'll send him a note this afternoon. I hope to 
 be able to go, but I must see Mr. Chance before I can give 
 a decided answer." 
 
 She went upstairs to put on her outdoor things. She 
 had ordered the brougham at eleven o'clock, with the inten- 
 tion of doing some shopping; but the shopping could wait; 
 she would drive over and see Cranley, and ask him to let 
 her off the soiree. 
 
 David had been frequently to the Empire Institute. Con- 
 stantly she called for her husband as she returned from 
 her afternoon's round, and was familiar with the little 
 waiting-room curtained off from the wide corridor; fa- 
 miliar with the two rooms in which Cranley-Chance did his 
 physiological and chemical work; familiar with the class 
 and other rooms in that high-up portion of the building 
 conceded to the college to which her husband was attached. 
 Familiar she was, too, with the oblong brass slab on whu-h 
 Cranley did his vivisections ; so familiar that it had lost for 
 her the air of half-repugnant mystery with which at first 
 it had been clothed; and had become, indeed, so changed 
 in significance by the views in which she had entrenched 
 herself, the knowledge she had acquired, that it seemed to 
 her now that her nerve was strong enough, her convictions
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 profound enough, her understanding sufficiently firm, to 
 enable her to witness a physiological experiment, unham- 
 pered by selfish and sentimental shrinking; upheld by that 
 spirit of scientific inquiry, of broader humanity, with which 
 she had learned to associate vivisectional inquiry. 
 
 But Cranley-Chance had steadily refused to allow her to 
 be present at even the simplest of his investigations; nor 
 had his decision been affected by her argument that if she 
 had the positive evidence of an eye-witness wherewith to 
 confront the accusations of Judy and her kind, if she could 
 vouch from personal knowledge that those accusations were 
 malicious and false, it would give her statements a validity 
 and a force which nothing else could assure to them. Low- 
 ther, appealed to, had chaffed David on her scientific cu- 
 riosity. He was pleased at the positive attitude which his 
 daughter's opinions had assumed, but supported her hus- 
 band in his view; and David had perforce continued to 
 maintain her own convictions and to do battle with Judy's 
 on second-hand evidence. 
 
 But as she was borne upwards in the lift to-day, there 
 was no thought in her mind of experiments or convictions, 
 no wish to gain knowledge or confute testimony; she was 
 thinking, and thinking only, of her father's invitation, and 
 her strongest desire for the moment was to induce Cranley 
 to release her from her engagement. 
 
 The youth who admitted her to the broad corridor fan- 
 cied the professor was engaged. Would Mrs. Cranley- 
 Chance wait for a minute while he went to see ? 
 
 "No, never mind," said David, impatient. She would 
 go along and tap at the door; it would be all right. 
 
 She was used to go direct to the professor's room, used 
 to what she called bearding him in his den. He knew her 
 particular little knock, and his answering "Come in, dear,"
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 245 
 
 was a joke between them. "For if it should be somebody 
 else," said David, "how surprised that somebody else would 
 be 1" When he could not let her in he would call out, "No 
 admittance," or come to the door and tell her how long she 
 would have to wait before he was ready ; and now, receiving 
 no answer to her knock, she stood waiting, expecting to 
 hear his step cross the floor within. But there was no 
 sound; and presently, having knocked a second time in 
 vain, she ventured to open the door and peep in. 
 
 The room was empty, as she had expected, and she was 
 vexed by the thought that the young man she had spoken 
 to had made a mistake, that her husband had gone away, 
 and that she had missed him. Then, in the inner room, 
 beyond the half-open door, she heard voices, and one the 
 professor's voice. Instantly the little feeling of hopeful 
 excitement revived, for she was inwardly convinced that 
 Cranley would let her have her way ; and with it, in the re- 
 action from momentary annoyance, came a return of the 
 merry mood of the morning. 
 
 David, since the days when she had played at being an 
 artist, had never quite lost, though the faculty had been 
 often latent, the child's instinct of play. There was in her 
 a perennial child-germ which, when favoured by mood and 
 circumstance, was wont to spring suddenly into blossom; 
 and now she was seized and fascinated by the idea of giv- 
 ing Cranley a surprise. At the far end of the room was a 
 cupboard with its door invitingly ajar; she would hide in 
 it, and when her husband had become absorbed in his work, 
 would suddenly present herself at his side. "Your 'Come 
 in, dear/ is superfluous to-day," she would say.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI 
 
 A QUARTER of an hour later Cranley-Chance had 
 entered the room and had carried out his part of 
 the programme so far as to be absorbed in his work ; so ab- 
 sorbed that David might have opened wide the door that 
 stood ajar, have left the cupboard without carefulness of 
 movement, have crossed the room without softening of 
 footsteps, and he would not have heard her. But David 
 had not moved. 
 
 Coming into the room, she had not noticed that the row 
 of bright instruments which usually lay on a shelf beneath 
 the brass slab, was ranged by its side; hiding herself, she 
 had had no idea of what the professor's work that morning 
 was to be. And now in her mind there was no room to 
 consider that she was defying her husband's wishes by re- 
 maining where she was; that she was, in fact, if not in in- 
 tention, a spy upon that which he had forbidden her to 
 witness; her consciousness was caught up in a crisis of 
 experience which held the whole of it. 
 
 When the dog a bitch and pregnant which now lay 
 upon the slab, had been brought into the room, David had 
 had her moment of consternation, bewildered, undecided, 
 regretful ; and ere that moment had passed, ere the conflict 
 between suddenly presented opportunity and loyal obedi- 
 ence could even definitely declare itself, the time for action 
 had gone by, the very idea of action was annihilated. For 
 David was swept right away from the consciousness of her- 
 
 246
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 247 
 
 self as herself, right away from the consciousness of those 
 ties, ideas, affections, circumstances, by means of which 
 we relate ourselves to life as we know it; swept on to a 
 plane of new and acute realisation which her experience 
 ihad never suggested and her imagination had never 
 touched. 
 
 She had entered that plane first by means of a swift and 
 graphic picture, a sudden memory. Ere paraldehyde and 
 morphine had rendered the dog motionless, a movement of 
 its body, a tremor, had called up an incident of the days 
 spent at the Villa, a scene in which Wuppums had hurt 
 her paw and had had it bound up by Judy. The trust of 
 the dog in her mistress had not failed, since she had licked 
 the hand from which she yet shrank ; but she shrank never- 
 theless, shaken with a nervous trembling which embraced 
 the whole docile form. And Judith had said: "They're 
 so nervous, even though they trust you, and especially the 
 bitches." The little scene had lain hidden away in the 
 background of David's recollection, without significance, 
 meaningless; and now, suddenly, it started forward into 
 life, a fact from which deduction was to be drawn, and 
 which bore direct upon that other fact, the dog on the brass 
 slab; the servant (it was a term Cranley-Chance had used 
 once) the servant of science. 
 
 It may be that the picture, suddenly upheld, would have 
 passed as quickly as it rose, have been relegated to the store- 
 house of those doubts and scruples which David had rHs- 
 missed, and left no trace in the mind where it showed 
 itself, had it not been followed by other pictures, not revived 
 from the past, but painted, strong and clear, in the present. 
 As it was, it formed, as has been said, a key to realisation. 
 
 These are the pictures that David watched in the paint- 
 ing.
 
 248 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 She saw the dog firmly secured by straps and clamps so 
 firmly that, conscious or unconscious, it could not have 
 moved; saw an incision made in its neck; saw the windpipe 
 bared with dissection knives, and the edges of the wound 
 held apart with chain hooks. As she watched, the involun- 
 tary shrinking in her fought with the thought: "It is an- 
 assthetised, of course, doesn't feel"; and then came the 
 echo of the professor's words to the assistant, words in 
 which paraldehyde and morphine occurred; and with the 
 echo the remembrance that he himself had once told her 
 that certain drugs were not true anassthetics, but only 
 narcotics. Of these drugs paraldehyde was one, and mor- 
 phine yes in that article of his she had helped him to 
 correct the proofs of it he had certainly said that morphia 
 only lessened, did not abolish pain. 1 
 
 But the pictures or the one picture that changed from 
 moment to moment went on. There had been in the first 
 phase of it a dash of vivid red; but now the blood flow was 
 checked by the assistant, who clamped the cut arteries and 
 veins with steel self-locking forceps, which tightly pinched 
 the vessels and flesh as they closed, and, thus closed, re- 
 mained a permanent part of the picture. 
 
 The picture was not quite like ordinary pictures, which 
 are silent things, for from this picture came sound; a low 
 sort of whistling, as through the incision made in the wind- 
 pipe the animal's breath rushed forth, ere the canula was in- 
 serted, and the artificial breathing apparatus was complete. 
 
 And all that happened, happened, as it were, to an 
 accompaniment of words that were repeated again and 
 again in David's mind, a refrain of statement and question. 
 "For the good of humanity," said one soundless voice; and 
 another asked continually, "What is good?" Thus it went 
 
 >App. 24.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 24-9 
 
 on while a fresh wound was made in the dog's neck ; while 
 the pulsating carotid artery was severed, clamped, and the 
 end near the heart connected by a glass and rubber tube to 
 a mechanical contrivance for the record of blood pressure: 
 thus it went on while the jugular vein was laid bare, and 
 so prepared that it could be easily dealt with later on. 
 
 And now the dog on the brass slab, strapped and 
 clamped, with wounds held open by hooks, with the severed 
 blood-vessels held secure from blood-letting in the grasp 
 of the forceps, was ready for the experiment proper. David 
 knew no difference between preparatory and directly experi- 
 mental w.ork ; and in spite of the knowledge on which she 
 prided herself, the knowledge which in conversations with 
 her husband she had gradually gained, that which her eyes 
 beheld was only parly intelligible to her understanding. 
 Yet she knew, as the picture changed again, knew and 
 realised that what was drawn out now from the incision 
 made in the dog's abdomen, was the womb ; though she did 
 not know, at the time did not know, that that womb held 
 the ripening germs of incipient life. The appeal made to 
 her later on by the outrage on maternity, on the function 
 sacred throughout all nature, was not made to her then. 
 
 And indeed, as regards emotion, it seemed to her, on 
 looking back, that she had been singularly unmoved; that 
 she had had no concern with feeling; that she had simply 
 stood and watched. 
 
 Watching, she saw the dog, mangled, dissected, powerless 
 in the hands of man; and the man, who had wrought the 
 mangling and dissection; and who performed his task as 
 coolly, as quietly, as deftly, as he performed those other 
 portions of his work which had to do with chemistry. And 
 looking at him, he became to her sinister, terrible, hardly 
 human, hardly even devilish ; but a soulless being, obeying
 
 250 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 automatically impulses of irresponsible force. What, in 
 truth, she saw was that which the love of knowledge, noble 
 in itself, pure in itself, can become when, divorced from 
 that higher morality, which is one of love's integral ele- 
 ments, it degenerates into lust. For the man she looked 
 upon was not consciously cruel, but only completely callous. 
 Pity was as far away from him as was anger or pleasure or 
 pain; the only emotion he was conscious of was the desire 
 to know, the intense, irresistible curiosity of the scientist 
 whose humanity is sunk in his science: and possessed by 
 that curiosity he was ruthless. 
 
 In the ftrange calm that held her, David noted the deli- 
 cacy of his manipulation; how deftly he attached the ex- 
 tracted womb to levers arranged so as to record upon a drum 
 the period and magnitude of contractions. She noted the 
 certainty of touch with which he severed the nerves; the 
 calm with which he compared the record of their action 
 with a previous record ; the absence of haste or flurry which 
 characterised his movements, as, in order to prevent the 
 dog dying from the shock and collapse caused by the magni- 
 tude of the operation, ere the experiment was complete, he 
 transferred it to the bath in which salt and water, kept at 
 blood heat, covered all wounds save that in the neck. 
 
 The experiment was nearly over now; there remained 
 but, what was, indeed, the chief end and gist of it, the 
 injection of a drug in solution into the jugular vein by 
 means of a syringe, and the recording of the drug's effect. 
 
 David, watching, did not know that the records of the 
 many similar experiments which her husband had per- 
 formed gave bewildering and opposing results; nor did it 
 occur to her, in those watching moments, to ask herself if 
 the administration of drugs to animals in a way, and in 
 conditions, which could never be possible in the case of a
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 251 
 
 human being, could have any practical bearing, even if the 
 results had added to accurate scientific knowledge by being 
 always the same. She did not think or reason at all; she 
 only looked at that picture of the motionless dog and the 
 emotionless man ; changing always like the evolving picture 
 of a cinematograph, but with one element in it that never 
 changed: the utter helplessness of "the servant of science." 
 Only once, quite at the beginning, she had a desire to cry 
 out; never once was she brought near to faintnees; never 
 once was she able to close her eyes. At the end, when it was 
 over, when she saw that it was quite over, she became con- 
 scious of a great longing; to get away; but knew, and re- 
 signed herself quite quietly to the knowledge that she must 
 wait 1 
 
 "Home!" 
 
 "The master's not coming, ma'am?" asked the coachman. 
 
 "No." 
 
 It was David's wont always, when she came home, to go 
 straight to the nursery. She went there to-day. It was her 
 wont when she had been away to put her arms about Vi, to 
 kiss and pet her. Her arms went round the little form to- 
 day, longingly, lovingly. Sometimes, in the intensity of 
 her desire to help the child, sometimes in the passion of her 
 tenderness, the tears came to her eyes and wet the face 
 close to her own. But to-day she did not cry. 
 
 >App. 25.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII 
 
 DAVID did not go either to the theatre or to the soiree 
 at the Royal Institution. To her father she wrote 
 that her evening was engaged ; to her husband she said that 
 she did not feel able to accompany him. When Cranley- 
 Chance had started, she put on a hat and cloak and. walked 
 to Harley Street. Lowther would be at the theatre, she 
 knew, and she should find her mother alone. She went up 
 to the drawing-room unannounced, and opened the door. 
 
 Lady Lowther was sitting by the fire, in her usual place, 
 dressed in her usual dress, knitting. 
 
 She looked up. "David!" Then in a different tone: 
 "Darling !" For David's face, as she crossed the room, had 
 changed. 
 
 The calm which had come upon her in the Empire Insti- 
 tute had endured through the rest of the day and through- 
 out the day which succeeded it. She had lain awake all 
 night, sleeping only a little when the late morning dawned ; 
 lain awake at her husband's side, listened to his regular 
 breathing, turned her cheek to him when he came to her, 
 and again ere he rose. Cranley-Chance, who was not ob- 
 servant where human nature was concerned, had noticed no 
 difference in her demeanour. She was quiet, certainly, but 
 she had her quiet days ; and when she said she did not feel 
 up to going out with him, he supposed that her head ached. 
 
 And David, sitting at table, sewing at a garment for Vi, 
 lying still, with eyes that stared out into the darkness, did 
 
 252
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 253 
 
 not know if she had changed or no. For she did not think ; 
 she looked at pictures. And when she turned away from 
 the pictures she felt as if she were in a desolate place, a 
 long way off from everybody and from ordinary life; and 
 she had a sense that before she could come back again she 
 must go through a process; intellectual was it? or emo- 
 tional ? or just the recognition of certain fundamental prin- 
 ciples of her own nature? 
 
 But into the cold area that surrounded her came a little 
 warm breath ; not a picture, but a feeling ; a desire, faint at 
 first, but growing, to see, to be with, her mother. David 
 had been tempted to despise that mother; had said to her- 
 self that she lacked character and independence ; had called 
 her colourless. But now she thought of her as tender, 
 gentle, patient ; not questioning much, but listening ; barren 
 of argument, but prodigal of sympathy. It was when she 
 came into that mother's presence that her face changed; 
 moved and worked; and when the voice said "Darling!" 
 David came back from the desolate place in a rush, in a 
 whirlwind of battling emotions, in a storm of tears. Kneel- 
 ing, she laid her arms upon her mother's knee, her head 
 upon her arms, and wept as if her heart would break. 
 
 Lady Lowther drew her knitting aside; she did not 
 speak, but stroked the brown head that lay upon her lap; 
 her face wore an expression of distressed bewilderment. It 
 was not till the crisis had passed, till the sobs had died 
 down, and David sat upright on a footstool at her feet, that 
 Lady Lowther said 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
 Then David told her, was able quite easily to tell her; 
 the narration came in swift graphic words that, conveying 
 the pictures to her mother's brain, relieved the biting pres- 
 sure of them on her own.
 
 254. PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Bertha, silent through all the narration, was, when it 
 ceased, for a minute silent still. Then she said: "Long 
 ago, when you were quite a little thing, I made a compact 
 with your father that I would never speak to you, never 
 seek to influence you, on- these subjects. I think I thought 
 at the time that I was wrong. A stronger woman, per- 
 haps, would have held on her course; but I was not I 
 never have been and at the time I was nervous, broken 
 down and your father was always masterful. Now that 
 this has happened I can speak to you, I can tell you all 
 about it. There is no use in not speaking, and I will tell 
 him what I have done before I go to bed to-night. I haven't 
 always been honest to myself, but I have been always honest 
 I think with Bernard. David, don't you think you'd 
 better get up and sit properly in a chair? You'll get 
 cramped down there." 
 
 The suggestion, so characteristic and BO prosaic, did 
 David good, and made her smile. 
 
 "No, thanks. I'm comfortable here. I'll lean against 
 you." 
 
 She rested against Bertha's knee, sideways, looking into 
 the fire. Lady Lowther was looking into a cupboard to 
 which nobody but herself and Isabel Barker had the key ; a 
 cupboard which she was about to unlock, showing to her 
 daughter its recesses, and the skeleton of remorse which, 
 shut in there, had weighted her spirit so long. 
 
 "When you were a little bit of a thing," she said pres- 
 ently, "between three and four, I went through a severe 
 operation; I had to have what they call a floating kidney 
 taken away. I am a coward, as you know, but I was not the 
 least nervous about that operation. I'd had an easy time 
 when you were born, and I remembered the effect of the 
 chloroform ; and the thought that they would give me an
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 255 
 
 anesthetic took away all my dread. Anaesthetics were a 
 sort of religion to me in those days ; I believed in them, I 
 think, quite as much as I believed in God, and trusted in 
 them more. I'd been brought up, you see, to be what Ber- 
 nard calls sentimental. Your grandfather loved animals, 
 all kinds of animals ; he never would have the birds killed, 
 I remember ; he said he would rather lose his fruit ; and I 
 was brought up to love them, too. Dogs and cats and rab- 
 bits we had pets of all kinds, and I was afraid of nothing 
 in that way, not even toads. Well, and then, when I grew 
 up, I married your father." 
 
 "Oh, mother, how could you?" The words came quick- 
 ly, almost before David knew the thought was in her mind. 
 
 "You see, I didn't know. Vivisection was only coming 
 into fashion then, and I didn't understand it. I hated 
 what I first heard about it, but Bernard told me my ideas 
 were all wrong, and the way he explained it made it seem 
 as if it were the best thing for animals as well as human 
 beings. Father was dead then, or perhaps I should have 
 heard the other side, and your grandmother was quite as 
 easily persuaded as I was. Though I must say," said Lady 
 Lowther in parenthesis, "that I have known a great many 
 people since, who were supposed to be much cleverer than 
 me and yet believed things that were told them just in the 
 same way." 
 
 "Comfortable things," said David, "yes, because one 
 wants to believe them." 
 
 "The anaesthetics were the chief things, of course. You 
 first made an animal unconscious, Bernard said, and found 
 out something wonderful, and then it got quite well and 
 knew nothing about it ; or else it was killed before it could 
 feel again. I didn't quite like the idea of the killing; but 
 then, when he pointed out to me that it was a much more
 
 256 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 merciful way of killing than by sport, I agreed, and it 
 seemed all right." 
 
 "It's much better when they're killed much. Go on!" 
 "Yes, I know it is, but I didn't know then, and didn't 
 think much about it. It was the operation made me think. 
 I went to it quite happily; I remember walking into the 
 room where the doctors were and saying good morning. 
 Isabel told me afterwards that everybody said I was so 
 brave ; but I wasn't really, you know, dear, because Bernard 
 had told me I was sure to get over it, and I trusted him 
 absolutely ; and as for the pain, I knew I shouldn't feel it. 
 I didn't feel it, at the time. It was when I came to oh, 
 the agony ! I shall never forget it, and it went on and on. 
 It was a shock to me to find I had to suffer so much; I 
 had never expected it which was stupid, of course, but I 
 had never thought about anything but the operation itself. 
 I remember saying to your father: 'I never imagined it 
 would be like this,' and he answered: 'Well, you couldn't 
 expect to be cut about as you've been, little woman (he used 
 to call me that in those days), and not feel it.' And then, 
 after he'd gone, I remember it all rushed into my mind 
 the thought of the animals that were operated upon and 
 not killed. At one time I had thought it was so much 
 
 worse to kill them, and now I was cared for, nursed, 
 
 petted; I had narcotics to dull the pain; everything was 
 
 done to help and ease me. But they When the thought 
 
 came to me, I forgot my own pain for a time. I sent for 
 Bernard, and I told him I was very open with him in 
 those days I told him what was in my mind. I remember 
 he laughed, and told me not to worry. That laugh was the 
 first thing that came between us; I couldn't forget it." 
 
 Bertha paused, but the figure at her feet did not move, 
 and presently she went on speaking.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 257 
 
 "I didn't say anything more till I was well, but I went 
 on thinking. I thought of the animals coming out of the 
 anaesthesia to pain like mine; and I thought how Bernard 
 and his friends had always said there was no pain in vivi- 
 section ; and I thought about the certificates Bernard held 
 which dispensed with the use of anaesthetics. I had always 
 believed everything I was told up till then. Now I began 
 to doubt. I knew that not feeling pain at the time of an 
 operation did not mean no pain after it; and I knew that 
 all vivisection couldn't be painless; I began to doubt 
 whether the men who did these things really cared or not 
 whether the animals suffered." 
 
 "They don't," David said. "They don't want to hurt, 
 but they don't really care, if it interferes with what they 
 want to know." 
 
 "When I got well I spoke to your father again, and that 
 time he got angry. Then I spoke to Isabel Barker, and 
 found that she hated vivisection as much as I hate it now. 
 Well, when Bernard saw how really upset I was, he tried to 
 soothe me down again. He brought forward all sorts of 
 arguments, and he assured me that all the things anti- 
 vivisectionists said were lies. Isabel, of course, was an 
 A.-V., and I knew she was not a liar ; but Bernald said the 
 lies were not always intentional, that they often came from 
 silly women not understanding. I don't know how it might 
 
 have ended whether for a time Anyhow, just at 
 
 that time we moved. We had been living at St. Leonards, 
 and we came up to London and took a house in Campbell 
 Square. What I went through there I cannot say. Night 
 after night I was kept awake by the howls and groans of 
 the animals belonging to the Campbell Street Hospital. 1 
 I believe something has been done now to deaden the 
 
 l App. 26.
 
 258 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 sounds, but in those days you heard them plainly. At first 
 I did not know what it was. When I found out you will 
 know why I could not sleep. To think of them, hour after 
 hour, helpless and in pain, recovered from the anaesthetics 
 (those who had had anaesthetics), but not from the oper- 
 ations ! I had been through an operation myself, you see, 
 and knew what it meant. It was Campbell Square that 
 brought things to a crisis. I couldn't stand it. I told 
 Bernard so, and I begged him and I remember that I 
 really had the hope that I might be able to influence him 
 I begged him to give up the experiments and be a doctor 
 and not a physiologist." 
 
 "And ?" David half turned as her mother paused. 
 
 "He was only amused at first; then he was angry. You 
 were a little bit of a thing, two years old, and I begged him, 
 for your sake, not to do things that, as you grew older, you 
 would hate. Then" Bertha paused for a moment "then 
 came the struggle. He said he would not have his child 
 taught ridiculous notions; rather than that, he would sep- 
 arate from me altogether ; that a hysterical woman was not 
 a fit person to bring up a child. I don't know of course 
 he could have separated from me, for I should never have 
 tried to stay in his house against his will but I don't know 
 whether he could have kept you from me." 
 
 "Of course he couldn't." 
 
 "Isabel said he couldn't, but he said he could. He came 
 in one day when Isabel was with me, and they had a fearful 
 row. It was patched up later on, in a sort of way, but they 
 never meet if they can help it. I always wondered your 
 father let you go to Lapelliere to a friend of hers." 
 
 "I suppose he thought all her friends were harmless 
 dowdies. And of course it's only lately he has realised 
 what a part Judy plays in the A.-V. movement."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 259 
 
 "Yes. Well, as I said, I wasn't sure whether he could 
 take you from me, and I didn't get the length of consulting 
 a lawyer. I I was foolish enough and weak enough to 
 dread the scandal and the being cast adrift, and I knew, 
 too, that a girl whose parents are separated has a slur upon 
 her. People always think it's the mother's fault, and that 
 the daughter will be like her." 
 
 "What am I to say?" asked David, as the low voice 
 ceased. "I don't know whether you were right or wrong." 
 
 "Yes, you do. You know I was wrong. I know it, too. 
 I agreed never to speak to you about what I felt so strongly, 
 to let you be brought up to believe in things I hated, to 
 take no active part in the movement which Bernard had 
 taught me to despise and which I longed now to join. And 
 when I had done it, I felt like a traitor, like Judas." 
 
 "Poor little mother!" 
 
 "The feeling seemed to kill the youth out of me. I gave 
 up caring about pretty clothes (I was very fond of them 
 once) ; I gave up caring to look my best; I seemed to sink 
 down into what I am. The only thing that has been a sort 
 of comfort to me has been this" she laid her hand upon 
 the knitting by her side "the work that sometimes used 
 to vex and irritate you. I got into touch, through Isabel, 
 with a firm that sells hand-knitted goods, and I have 
 worked for it regularly for years. The money I earn is my 
 own, not Bernard's, and I give it all to the one thing. It 
 makes me feel especially going on working when I am 
 tired a little less of a a coward." 
 
 David's eyes were wet again. "Dear mother, if I'd only 
 known !" 
 
 "But it was just what you might not know." 
 
 "You must have been so lonely, and I gave you no sym- 
 pathy."
 
 260 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "I had you with me, dear; I had what I had bargained 
 for. A sort of wall between us there must always be, I 
 knew, unless something happened like what has happened, 
 and I never knew quite whether to hope or fear it." 
 
 "You should have hoped." 
 
 "It is your relations with Cranley. I know I know 
 that you will never give way like me." 
 
 "I don't know what I shall do. No, that's not true. I 
 didn't, when I came here. Now I think I do." David got 
 up. "Good night, mother!"
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII 
 
 WHEN David got home she went into her husband's 
 ... study; the book-lined room, with the huge, 
 leather-covered writing-table, and the capacious arm-chairs, 
 in which, to be comfortable, she could not sft, but had to 
 curl herself up in cat fashion. 
 
 There was one chair, stiff and straight, which stood be- 
 fore the writing-table, and it was to this chair that David 
 went. Sheets of the sermon paper on which Cranley wrote 
 his articles for scientific and medical periodicals lay on the 
 table, some blank, some covered with his close, somewhat 
 cramped handwriting. David was used sometimes to scan 
 the loose sheets that often lay thus; sometimes she would 
 alter a word or add a comma, and would say jestingly that 
 she did her best to improve her husband's English. To- 
 night her eyes, absently at first, glanced along the written 
 page ; and then she saw that the professor had been writing 
 an account of the experiment of yesterday. 
 
 "The changes in the uterus induced by drugs are so 
 important from a practical point of view," she read, "that 
 I have taken up the question afresh and have performed 
 a large number of experiments on dogs, rabbits, and cats." 1 
 
 David turned away. "A large number of experi- 
 ments " A large number! 
 
 She rose, took a cushion, and placing it before the fire, 
 sat down there and thought. She thought for an hour; 
 short, because the time passed unheeded; long, because 
 
 'App. 27. 
 261
 
 262 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 there were so many thoughts in it. Words came back to 
 her that she had listened to unheeding and dismissed with 
 contempt ; words, too, that she had listened to with irritated 
 discomfort and dismissed with decision; other words that, 
 in a discussion she had ventured upon with John Cameron, 
 had been uttered by him, and that she had never been able 
 quite to dismiss. 
 
 "There is something more precious," he had said, "than 
 knowledge, even accurate knowledge; more precious than 
 physical gain, even assured gain; the spiritual progress of 
 man. Any method of acquiring anything, whether it be 
 knowledge or ease, material advantage or mental power, any 
 method which inflicts pain upon any sentient creature, 
 save for the creature's benefit, is against that progress. 
 Vivisection appeals to the two basest instincts of humanity 
 selfishness and cowardice; instincts which delay man's 
 march, and degrade his nobility. Shall man take knowl- 
 edge of his body, comfort of his body, in exchange for his 
 soul?" 
 
 And she thought of Claude Bernard, one of the fathers 
 of modern vivisection, whose daughter had left him, refused 
 to live with him, because of the cruelties he committed. 1 
 
 "But you must remember the point of view." Cranley- 
 Chance's arguments, which had soothed or satisfied her, rose 
 up and did battle for his cause. "The character of a deed 
 is in its motive." And then came Judy's words, when, at 
 second-hand, David had advanced Cranley's argument. 
 
 "All very well for the man who does the deed," Judy 
 had said, "but it has no validity for the man, woman, child, 
 or animal who is hurt. A man may knock me flat on the 
 road, bash my head in and make off with my purse. His 
 motives may be of the purest; his wife and children may 
 
 *App. 28.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 263 
 
 be starving, and what more commendable than to feed 
 your children and your wife ? But my head hurts me just 
 as much as if he had wanted to get drunk on my money, or 
 prove scientifically that a head hit with a certain force will 
 bleed. Motive is all very well, my dear, and an individual 
 may be absolved by his motives for all I know. But if, safe 
 in his own purity, he lowers the standard of the community 
 by the morality of his acts, I say he is a pest to that com- 
 munity, even though his acts should result in the discovery 
 of a gold mine." 
 
 And she thought of the words which in her girlhood had 
 puzzled her; which all her life had haunted her; which 
 baffled still her understanding: "This present life is not 
 the end where much glory doth abide; therefore have they 
 prayed for the weak." The glory of science ; would it not 
 abide? The weak ? 
 
 David moved her head. The door of the study was open, 
 and she could hear the latchkey turn in the front door. 
 But she did not rise. Then, as the latch lifted and the door 
 turned on its hinges, she got up quickly; for Cranley- 
 Chance was speaking ; it was evident that he was not alone. 
 
 She got up, conscious both of relief and vexation. Per- 
 haps Cranley was going to Glasgow to-morrow to give two 
 lectures on the progress of physiological knowledge during 
 the last decade; perhaps she would have to defer what she 
 had to say till his return. 
 
 Then into the study came Lowther. 
 
 "David!" he exclaimed; and "David!" echoed Cranley- 
 Chance behind him. 
 
 "How did you meet?" was all David said. 
 
 "I wanted to see him," answered Lowther, "and as I had 
 a card, I got rid of Mallison, who was with me, and went 
 round by the Institution, thinking to bring you both home.
 
 264 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 He told me you were not very fit, and I expected you'd 
 have gone to bed." 
 
 Chance was looking at the hat and cloak flung down on 
 a neighbouring chair. 
 
 "Where have you been?" he asked. 
 
 "To Harley Street." There was a dryness in David's 
 throat, a thumping in her chest that made her voice sound 
 constrained and queer. 
 
 Both men looked at her. 
 
 "What's the matter?" asked Lowther. 
 
 For a moment David was tempted to answer, "Nothing." 
 She was not a coward, but she dreaded her father's tongue, 
 shrank from the derisive spirit which, when his prejudices 
 were combated, sat in his eyes and gave a biting tone to his 
 voice. 
 
 She had arranged what she was going to say to her hus- 
 band, and, strung up as she was, she had thought she would 
 have no difficulty in saying it. But with Lowther it was 
 different. She had imagined that when she saw him again 
 he would have learned from her mother what had befallen 
 her, and how, by that befalling, she had been affected. She 
 would meet his sarcasms, steel herself to meet them, but 
 she would not have to give him the information from which 
 those sarcasms would spring. It would be strain enough 
 simply to meet them; a strain all the harder in that, in a 
 sense, limited to be sure, but actual, her father had been a 
 hero to her. Though she had opposed him sometimes in 
 matters of personal plans and wishes, though in certain di- 
 rections she had maintained her own views in defiance of 
 his, his mental standpoint had been nevertheless the stand- 
 ard by which she had measured mental capacity; in ques- 
 tions of intellectual discernment and scientific judgment, 
 she had reverenced his opinion and craved his approval.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 65 
 
 She had been flattered by the footing of equality on which 
 of late years he had discoursed to her of his professional 
 interests; had applauded his sweeping denunciations of all 
 that was maudlin, sentimental, and reactionary; and had 
 prided herself on being ahead of those futile folk whose 
 heads, in Lowther's phrase, were as soft as their hearts. 
 
 Now she must lose her place in her father's estimation; 
 not only lose it, but witness the process of forfeiture; see 
 the eyes that had glanced approval grow hard and jeering; 
 hear the jibes that had evoked her laughter turned against 
 herself; feel herself sink from being "a woman of uncom- 
 mon sense" into a member of that contempt-laden company 
 which Lowther comprehensively designated as "women and 
 fools." 
 
 Feeling all this, she hesitated ; only for a moment. She 
 had always had the courage of her convictions ; it faltered, 
 but did not fail her now. 
 
 "Just this," she answered. She did not move as she 
 spoke, but turned her eyes from face to face, as she ad- 
 dressed first one man and then the other. "When your 
 invitation came yesterday morning, I felt I must speak to 
 Cranley before accepting it. I drove down to see him and 
 went up as usual. They told me" her eyes turned to 
 Cranley-Chance "that it was doubtful whether you were 
 not engaged " 
 
 "I never heard you were there, never heard anything 
 about it. I was engaged, but they ought " 
 
 "It was nobody's fault. I said I'd go to your room 
 and see; and I went and found it empty." David stopped, 
 to swallow something that seemed rising in her throat 
 
 "I was probably in the inner room. If you'd called, I 
 should have heard you.'* 
 
 "You were there; I heard your voice. I thought I'd
 
 266 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 play you a trick surprise you hide myself and and 
 come out later, when you were at work." 
 
 Cranley-Chance gave vent to an exclamation, took a 
 step backwards; but David did not heed him; her eyes 
 turned and met her father's eyes, critically, acutely ob- 
 servant. 
 
 "I did hide." 
 
 "And saw him do a vivisection, and were upset by it. So 
 much for disobedience!" said Lowther. "Now perhaps 
 you'll admit I was right?" 
 
 "You were there all the time?" cried Chance. "Good 
 God ! David, I find it hard to forgive you." 
 
 David answered her father. "You were right in one 
 way; but in another quite, quite wrong." 
 
 "Indeed?" 
 
 "It wasn't the least a fit experiment for you to see," 
 broke in the professor. "For a novice for a woman " 
 
 "Don't you think you'd better go to bed and sleep it 
 off?" asked Lowther. "I should give her a little bromide, 
 Cranley. Nerves a bit upset ; tendency to hysteria." 
 
 This time David answered her husband, before he had 
 time to reply to her father's suggestion. 
 
 "It's just because I'm a woman, I think, that I was 
 specially interested; just because I'm a woman that I was 
 specially appalled." 
 
 "Ha !" said Lowther, in a tone that implied "Now it's 
 coming. This is what I expected." 
 
 "Don't try to discuss things you can't possibly under- 
 stand," said Cranley-Chance. "To follow that experiment 
 you would require a training and an experience " 
 
 "I dare say; and I don't want to discuss it; I want as 
 little discussion as possible. I only want you to under- 
 stand, both of you" it was Lowther's eyes she looked
 
 PRIESTS OP PROGRESS 267 
 
 into "that when you talked to me about vivisection, and I 
 talked too, and listened, I didn't in the least realise what 
 it meant." 
 
 Lowther's lower lip went out. " Half a lifetime of logic 
 annihilated by the sight of a drop of blood ! That's wom- 
 an," said he. "And she wants the franchise!" 
 
 "I knew you'd jeer," said David. "I was prepared 
 for it." Now that the storm had come, now that her 
 father's face actually wore the look she had dreaded, she 
 felt that it was easier to bear than she had expected. The 
 sense that it is impossible to go back sometimes supplies 
 the courage to go forward. "As for logic these are things 
 that cannot be reasoned about until they are thoroughly un- 
 derstood." 
 
 "I fully agree," put in Lowther. "And the proposition 
 that you advance is, if I mistake not, that you now thor- 
 oughly understand the scientific aspect of vivisection. On 
 that, Cranley, I think I'll have a cigar. You don't object 
 to smoke, I think?" he said, addressing David. 
 
 She handed him the matchbox from the mantelpiece. 
 
 "I realise something that I had not realised before; I 
 make no claim to understanding. I believe I accepted 
 your opinions, and" her eyes turned to Chance "and 
 your assurances, because it was so much more comfortable 
 to accept them. It made me seem in my own eyes, and 
 in yours" she glanced from face to face "a clever, ad- 
 vanced woman, capable of appreciating the scientific spirit. 
 I dare say there are women, medical women, who really 
 think as you do, who have been so trained, as you say, 
 that they can realise what these things mean and still 
 uphold them. No, I don't want you to speak, Cranley, till 
 I have finished. And I dare say there are experiments 
 quite different from the one I saw; it may be that there
 
 268 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 are experiments quite as I have been often told quite 
 painless. That hardly seems to me to come in. What I 
 feel is that a system which includes the kind of thing I 
 saw yesterday, is a system that goes against something 
 which is more important than anything and everything 
 that system may find out or acquire. I mean," David 
 said, losing a little her manner of calm statement, and 
 speaking now with a slight tremor in her voice, a note of 
 appeal in her tone, "that there is something in me which 
 would rather suffer pain than benefit by doing to an animal 
 what you what was done yesterday." 
 
 She glanced from face to face with eyes that said 
 "Don't you understand ?" 
 
 Cranley-Chance, angry with his wife, was, nevertheless, 
 more distressed than angry; Lowther was only angry. 
 David perceived intuitively the difference of attitude, and 
 her look rested on her husband. 
 
 "If you'd only obeyed me," he said, and said it testily, 
 "this wouldn't have happened, and it would have been all 
 right." 
 
 "I didn't deliberately disobey you. And I I'm glad 
 it happened. It wouldn't have been 'all right.' I should 
 have been happier, perhaps, in a way, going on thinking 
 that vivisection could be done without cruelty, but " 
 
 "Cruelty!" broke in Lowther. "Pooh! She's learnt 
 the language already, Cranley; cruelty, torture, inhuman 
 monster. Well, it's an easy vocabulary being so limited. 
 And so we are cruel, Cranley and I? an inhuman father? 
 a monster of a husband ? How ? Why do you call us cruel ?" 
 
 "Because you do cruel things." 
 
 "To you?" asked Chance. 
 
 "No. But many men who have done all sorts of things, 
 have been kind to their wives and children."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 269 
 
 "And children," echoed Lowther. "How about Vi? Is 
 the chance of her recovery to be sacrificed to anti-vivisec- 
 tionist principles?" 
 
 "I will do for Vi what I've always done," David an- 
 swered, "all I can. But I don't want you," she said to 
 her husband, "to go on making experiments. It has done 
 no good; nothing that you have done has given her even 
 
 five minutes' ease ; and apart from that, I " She made 
 
 an effort, and looked Lowther full in the face. "You know 
 what it means to me to see Vi suffer ; or it hurts, perhaps, 
 more than you know. But there are prices that one can't 
 pay, however much one may want what they would buy; 
 things one can't do. This scientific way of trying to 
 escape from suffering is one of them. It's not only the ani- 
 mals, but the women and children little children " 
 
 Her voice faltered. 
 
 She had spoken, not defiantly, not with any assumption 
 of heroic sentiment, but in a low voice, almost deprecat- 
 ingly. But Lowther had no pity. 
 
 "You have it all very pat. Who's been coaching you ?" 
 
 "It's that Home woman who's at the bottom of it all," 
 said Chance. 
 
 David answered her father. "I suppose the thoughts 
 must have been in me for a long time, only I wouldn't listen 
 to them. I think there was a part of me that knew always 
 it was cowardly to take advantage of defenceless things; 
 but I hid away from it; I wouldn't let myself know what it 
 
 meant. But I can't hide any more. And so " David 
 
 broke off. "I think I'll go upstairs now." She turned to 
 the professor. "You and I will talk this out when you 
 come back from Glasgow." 
 
 David spent the night in the room with Vi. She told 
 the nurse, who slept in an adjoining room with the door
 
 270 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 open, that she could shut the door; and she herself at- 
 tended to the child's wants, the emotion in her finding 
 vent in an added tenderness. 
 
 "Vi," she said more than once, "we'll bear what we 
 have to bear as best we can; but we'll keep to the clean 
 ways, dear, you and I." 
 
 Most of the night she knelt by the child's side, but in 
 the early morning lay down upon the couch and fell asleep. 
 She was still asleep when Cranley-Chance came into the 
 room. 
 
 His entrance roused her, and she sat up, rubbing her 
 eyes and trying to define the weight that clung to her con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 "I've come to say good-bye to Vi," said Chance. He 
 bent down and kissed the child; then turned. "And to 
 you," he added, "though I was tempted, by Jove ! though 
 I am more vexed with you, David, than I can say." 
 
 David had remembered now; she had risen from the 
 couch, and was standing beside it. Her impulse was to 
 turn away; but she remembered that she had not yet 
 made her appeal to him, that it was still possible he might 
 listen to that appeal ; and the sense of justice in her caused 
 her to stand still, to let him take her hand and kiss her 
 cheek. 
 
 Afterwards, looking back, she was very glad.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX 
 
 THE days that followed were to David like a dream a 
 dream that had begun in a nightmare, and that 
 ended in like fashion. 
 
 But between the graphic scenes of start and finish waa 
 a space; of dreaminess rather than a dream, because so 
 little happened in it. The days went by, seeming not quite 
 real; the daily routine was followed, seeming not quite 
 actual; but the days were commonplace, and the routine 
 unbroken. The only thing that was different in David's 
 outer life was that she did not go out during the day and 
 denied herself to visitors. 
 
 But though dreaminess lay upon the surface of her life 
 and, touching the tangible side of it, made the tangible 
 vague, her mental world was vividly alive; pulsating with 
 thought; thickly peopled with those emigrant reflections 
 and sentiments which she had banished at the birth. She 
 did not seek to see Judy: she did not go to her mother 
 again, save once for a very short time : she sat in the room 
 where Lowther had loosed at her the shafts of his contempt, 
 and read books which till now she had refused to read. 
 
 She read in Sydney Ringer's Therapeutics, 1 the book 
 which Judy had asked her to study, and which she had, on 
 one excuse or another, arranged to ignore, of experiments 
 on human subjects, patients in London hospitals. 
 
 She read in a number of the Revue des deux Mondes, 
 
 *App. 29. 
 271
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 which Judy had sent her, and which she had never opened 
 till now, the words of the distinguished scientist, Dr. Charles 
 Richet, these words : "I do not believe that a single experi- 
 menter says to himself . . . 'Here is an experiment 
 which will relieve or will cure the disease of some man/ 
 No, in truth he does not think of that. He says to him- 
 self : 'I shall clear up an obscure point; I will seek out a 
 new fact/ And this scientific curiosity which alone ani- 
 mates him is explained by the high idea he has formed of 
 science. This is why we pass our days in foetid laboratories, 
 surrounded by groaning creatures, in the midst of blood 
 and suffering, bent over palpitating entrails." 1 
 
 And she read, seeing Crile's name on the professor's 
 bookshelves, Crile's own account of his experiments on dogs. 
 
 Many of those experiments had been performed, she 
 knew, in her husband's laboratory, lent for the purpose, and 
 were therefore, by her husband, approved and counte- 
 nanced. 
 
 She learned now what they were, or some of them ; heart 
 and nerve failed when she had read but a few of the hun- 
 dred and forty-eight experiments recorded. For many of 
 these experiments consisted of almost unspeakable mutila- 
 tions: of the "manipulation," after the dogs were cut open, 
 of the intestines, the whipping of the intestines, the pouring 
 of boiling water on the intestines; of the .crushing of 
 testicles ; the crushing of paws ; the application of a Bunsen 
 burner to nose and paw; the pulling out of the eye and 
 burning of the socket; the tearing out of organs; the 
 dilation of acutely sensitive parts. From time to time she 
 came across the statement that "the dog was not .under 
 complete anaesthesia," or that "the animal struggled on ap- 
 plication of the flame"; and she turned from the accounts 
 
 >App. 30,
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 273 
 
 of the experiments, lasting, some of them, for two and 
 three hours, to seek out the summing up of results. What 
 knowledge, what benefits had been bought at such a price? 
 
 "Surgical shock, then," she read, "is due mainly to a 
 vasomotor impairment or breakdown. The cardiac and 
 respiratory factors may be of considerable importance. 
 However, the main effect is on the vasomotor mechanism. 
 If the foregoing be true, it will be seen how much more 
 important is prevention than treatment. Prevention of 
 shock may best be accomplished by taking into account all 
 the known physiological functions of every tissue and organ 
 of the body in a way that would suggest itself to any prac- 
 tical surgeon. While the cause may be local, the treatment 
 must be general. It would seem to be desirable to direct 
 special attention to the distinction made between collapse 
 and shock. The result of action is reaction: of rest is 
 restoration." 1 
 
 There were no italics on the printed pages, but David's 
 mind italicised certain portions of the experimenter's con- 
 clusions as she read; and then returned with astonishment 
 to consider them. The futile puerility of it all amazed 
 her. Prevention more important than treatment! And 
 that prevention to be accomplished in a way that would 
 suggest itself to any practical surgeon ! Action would re- 
 sult in reaction, and rest in restoration! Were these the 
 scientific data that had been gained by a hundred and fifty 
 barbarous experiments? Gained? No, for the most ele- 
 mentary knowledge, the crudest common sense, could surely 
 have pronounced these platitudes without resorting to such 
 means. 
 
 That all vivisectors were not like the author of the book 
 she was well aware; even in the reaction of her present 
 
 J App. 31.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 attitude she preserved a sufficient impartiality of judgment 
 to remember that there were men marching under the 
 same flag as that author, whose motives seemed to them- 
 selves humane, whose methods were not wilfully barbarous, 
 whose scientific achievements were not grotesquely out of 
 proportion to the suffering they entailed. But remembering 
 all this; retaining still, even to a greater extent than she 
 was conscious of, that reverence for science which had been 
 instilled into her as a child and fostered throughout her 
 life; and longing, indeed, to find justification for the acts 
 and the principles of her father and her husband, she found 
 herself unable to doubt that a system, a body of men, which 
 countenanced such cruelties as those which she had just 
 read about, was a system more productive of abuses than 
 advantage; a company whose vision, individual and cor- 
 porate, had been perverted by the aims which controlled it. 
 
 And she realised, reading and thinking during these 
 strange days, that there is in man something more im- 
 portant than the desire for material, commonly called scien- 
 tific, knowledge; that there is for man a higher destiny 
 than the conquest of pain, or even the conquest of Xature. 
 Vaguely, to be sure, and slowly, the realisation dawned" in 
 her consciousness that the spirit of man is a reality and not 
 a theological conception, and that the development of that 
 spirit means the only real advance of humanity. 
 
 In the evenings, when the curtains were drawn within 
 and the gas lamps glimmered without, when Vi had been 
 read to, soothed, and, if possible, amused, David went out 
 into that region, peopled, solitary, teeming with contra- 
 dictory elements and antagonistic forces, known as the 
 streets of London; the region which Sidney Gale in his 
 student days had frequented ; facing, defying, hiding from,
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 275 
 
 the same problems which David now was facing; to find 
 and accept her soul's solution of them. 
 
 And walking thus, choosing the quieter, half-deserted 
 streets which lay around her home, not only the problems, 
 but her own course in regard to them, became clear to her. 
 She would not lead such a life as her mother had led ; she 
 would not sacrifice her convictions to conventions, or ac- 
 quiesce In practices which had become abhorrent to her. 
 On the other hand, she was convinced of the entire hope- 
 lessness of seeking, in any way, to alter her husband's views. 
 One of three things therefore must happen. Either she 
 must be allowed openly to declare her opinions and to work 
 in support of them; or, holding fast to those opinions 
 while Cranley maintained his, she would abandon active 
 propaganda if he would abjure vivisectional experiment; 
 or, she must do as Claude Bernard's daughter had done, 
 leave him. The question of the custody of Vi hardly dis- 
 turbed her ; she would have the child, of course, for Cranley 
 would not know what to do with her. 
 
 There were times when she seemed to see herself living 
 away from her husband ; times when she cherished' the hope 
 that he would consent to compromise; rare moments when 
 she dreamed that she might win him away from the ugly 
 side of science to the standpoint to which she had herself 
 been brought. Such moments died almost before she knew 
 they were in existence; but one evening, as she entered 
 Manchester Square from Hinde Street, the sense that it 
 might be possible definitely to influence her husband lifted 
 her for a few instants to a pinnacle of hope! In the house 
 the pinnacle perished, and she fell into a gulf of tumultu- 
 ous foreboding, shrinking from- the contest which lay ahead 
 of her, dreading the day of Cranley's return. 
 
 In Vi's room she found no consolation, for Vi was in
 
 276 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 pain, restless and unhappy. She was able at last to give 
 some ease to the poor little body, to soothe in a measure the 
 strained nerves; and seeing that the child was disposed to 
 doze, she went into the next room to stand for a few min- 
 utes by an open window. 
 
 Outside, in the strtets, sire had had a glimpse of hope; 
 she longed again to look forth into the night. She would 
 find, perhaps, if not hope, courage; if not courage, calm; 
 for, as she walked, calm had seemed' to' her to be the 
 evening's special attribute. Calm it still was, but there was 
 movement too, and, besides the street sounds, a low soft 
 pattering. A thin rain dropped; a faint wind wandered; 
 the night was full of sighs.
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 NEXT morning came the telegram: 
 "Your husband very ill. Come at once. 
 STKACHAN." 
 
 Strachan was the name of Cranley's host, David knew. 
 
 Had the message been less peremptory, she might have 
 hesitated, uncertain whether to stay with the child whom 
 she never left, or to go to the husband from whom she 
 was half estranged; but the words on the thin piece of 
 paper were a command, and after the first instant's doubt 
 she did not think of disobeying it. 
 
 She sent a message to Harley Street, told her maid to 
 pack a portmanteau, rushed out and bought a fresh con- 
 signment of toys for Vi> and soon was on her way to Euston 
 to catch the two o'clock train north. 
 
 Borne along in that train, all her thoughts were at first 
 a question. Was it an accident, or illness, in the ordinary 
 meaning of the word, illness sudden and severe, that was the 
 cause of her summons ? Questions such as these, question;? 
 separated from reply by hours of suspense, will go on 
 knocking at heart and. brain, all the more peristent in that 
 they find no answer. But in David's mind, at this time, 
 were many problems ; and after a time she passed from sur- 
 mise to reflection. 
 
 It was twelve years since she had married Cranley- 
 Chance, and she went again through those years, treading 
 the quick path of memory. In the light of greater experi- 
 
 277
 
 278 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 ence, she recognised how far she had been from what is 
 ordinarily called love when she became his wife; she had 
 known it at the time; she knew it more surely now. She 
 had respected her husband, and been flattered by the fact 
 that she had been able to attract so celebrated a man. The 
 position he had won for himself appealed to her pride and 
 ministered to her ambition; and he had evoked in her the 
 admiration which she always accorded to strength and ca~ 
 pacity. But love, on her part, had been altogether absent 
 from her married life, and affection, during the first years 
 of it, meagre. Then had come Vi's illness, the hope of her 
 recovery, the drawing nearer to Cranley on the common 
 ground of that hope. The hope had never blossomed, but 
 the sympathy which was an offshoot of it had bloomed into 
 a fuller affection than Chance, in the first days of disap- 
 pointed longing, had dared to hope for. 
 
 In the glaring light 'of her experience at the Empire 
 Institue, thinly veiled, slightly softened by the mist and 
 mystery of those hours so near and so obscure which lay 
 before her, David looked at thnt affection. It had been 
 real; not vastly deep, but ess*.. atially true; so much she 
 recognised. Was it dead ? Had it been destroyed with the 
 belief on which, partly, it had been founded? She sought 
 the answer' horiestly, and found it : No. For David, know- 
 ing full well that the man who was her husband was the 
 same man- whom she had watched at work in his laboratory, 
 was unable, actually, to identify the two : in her feeling, if 
 not in her thought, Yi's father was distinct from the famous 
 vivisector. To her, that vivisector remained an actual 
 being, indeed, yet partaking of the nature of a phantasm ; 
 of the essence of the nightmare in which he had figured; 
 living, terrible, potent, but hardly a man. 
 
 And in truth, the feeling in her was justified by fact;
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 279 
 
 since man, overstepping certain limits of his being, becomes 
 either more or less than himself. Within those limits lie 
 the attributes of humanity, and he may strike the gamut of 
 the whole, from brute instincts to sublimity. Beyond those 
 limits stretches, on the one hand, the region of divinity ; on 
 the other, the realm of that spiritual wickedness which can 
 have its habitat only in high places. The one region is 
 entered" when intellect, touching the highest point attain- 
 able by human brain, transcends, in love made perfect, the 
 confines of mortality; the other is reached when intellect, 
 in the pride of its own possibilities, divests itself of all 
 relationship with love. 
 
 It was with that dehumanised atmosphere about him that 
 David had seen her husband in the laboratory, and, seeing 
 him thus, had found him, in some indefinable way, different 
 from the man who was her daily companion. She did not 
 seek in these waiting hours to puzzle out the reason of the 
 difference; she tried only to shut out from her mind the 
 pictures which were bound up with it, and to reinforce 
 with other pictures the tenderness which she had once 
 given to her husband. 
 
 Rugby, Preston, York. People got out of the train; 
 trays, cups, and baskets were borne up and down the plat- 
 form. Would she have tea ? No, David wanted no tea. 
 
 At last Glasgow ! 
 
 A manservant was waiting, looking out for her. Was 
 she Mrs. Cranley-Chance ? He had a carriage. 
 
 The professor? He was very ill, no doubt; and no 
 better. The man was vague in his replies, unsatisfactory, 
 seemed not to know what was the matter. 
 
 When she reached Mr. Strachan's house, Mr. Strachan 
 himself met her in the hall, took her into a room at the 
 end of it, begged her to sit down.
 
 280 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Her husband was no better; he, Mr. Strachan, was afraid 
 in fact, they had decided, he and the doctors, that it was 
 
 better it would be only painful She could not see 
 
 him. 
 
 "Why? What is it? Tell me, please," said David, "at 
 once." 
 
 Then he told her; of the suffering, the hopelessness, the 
 inevitable end. He did not tell her, because no one could 
 tell her, since no one knew, save Cranley-Chance alone, of 
 the worse suffering which intervened between the first stab 
 of suspicion and the certainty of despair. 
 
 In the last few days David's husband had been through 
 a martyrdom, all the more acute in that the meaning of 
 his symptoms was made plain to him by professional knowl- 
 edge. That slight mark caused by the teeth of the dog at 
 Les Avants had entirely passed away, leaving no trace to 
 vision or sensation. It was at the point of the Pasteur 
 inoculation that the pain declared itself, the tingling, the 
 redness, and the swelling; it was from the poison becoming 
 active at that point, that the discomfort, the difficulty in 
 swallowing, all the signs which Chance knew and recog- 
 nised, drew their being. 1 
 
 Strachan thought his guest changed, melancholy, ill at 
 ease ; this man of morose manner and strange ways was not 
 the man he had known. He had looked forward to this 
 visit, to talking over old times and future discoveries; but 
 the deeds of the past, the science of the future, had no more 
 interest for the miserable man, who strove to hide his 
 misery. 
 
 Cranley-Chance's first lecture was lacking in coherence, 
 feeble in delivery; his host and the brilliant audience as- 
 
 'App. 32.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 281 
 
 sembled to listen to him were alike disappointed. The 
 second lecture was never given. 
 
 Downstairs David waited, unoccupied, appalled, with 
 nothing to do but wait. Waiting through those last days, 
 she was rent with pity for the man she might not see. 
 Those pictures he had painted in her mind were wiped out, 
 for the time being, by another picture, dim with the mys- 
 tery, weird with the horror, that clings to the unknown; 
 the picture of her husband in the grasp of the disease which 
 had seized him as he sought to flee from it. Now and again 
 Mr. Strachan came in with vague reports, which gave no 
 distinctness to the picture : once or twice sounds from that 
 room at the top of the house cast flashes of terrible light 
 upon it. 
 
 If in those hours David, by giving her life for her hus- 
 band, could have saved him, she would have given it. She 
 had no thought of him in that waiting space, save the 
 desire to comfort, the longing to aid him in his agony. Had 
 she been allowed, she would have braved the mystery of 
 that picture which was all she had to look at, and gone to 
 him ; but Strachan and the doctors would not listen to her 
 pleas. She could do no good, she was told, would only be 
 in the way. The patient that was what they called him 
 now the patient himself, would rather she did not come. 
 
 Pity and terror possessed her all the while the tragedy 
 went on. When it was over she wept as she had wept not 
 long before at her mother's knee.
 
 CHAPTER XLI 
 
 JUDY was jubilant. Her dear David had come abroad 
 with her, and she and her dear David were at one on 
 the question which lay nearest her heart. 
 
 They did not discuss the question ; did not often refer 
 to it even; the horror of that which had brought about 
 David's change of attitude was still dark in her memory, 
 and it was Judy's desire, and her constant endeavour, to 
 lead her friend's mind away from the thoughts which dis- 
 tressed her. David, appreciating that endeavour, did her 
 best to back it up. She was not, by nature, morbid; her 
 healthy physique and abundant vitality helped her through 
 much that might have wrought havoc in a mind hampered 
 by a weakly body; and the keynote of her personality was 
 joyousness. 
 
 Yet she was keenly sensitive, acutely impressionable, and 
 as she walked up the long straight road which leads from 
 the town of Cannes to the Hotel d'Angleterre, her face 
 showed signs of the suffering she had passed through. She 
 was dressed in deep mourning, but no longer wore her 
 widow's weeds. At first she had worn them in their com- 
 pleteness, for Lady Lowther, who had never liked her son- 
 in-law, was particular in the matter of posthumous respect, 
 and David accepted, without question, her mother's decree. 
 Horror was still upon her, and the fact that whenever she 
 drove out she was hampered by a veil which she constantly 
 sat upon, did not seem either to add to or detract from it.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 283 
 
 Then, seven months later, when the inconvenience of her 
 garments was beginning to obtrude itself upon her atten- 
 tion, she wore them in an altered spirit, with a sense of 
 congruity, with an almost eager willingness. But she wore 
 them, not for Cranley, but for Vi. And it was of Vi she 
 was thinking now, and of the blank, wide and dark, which 
 the little suffering child had left behind her. 
 
 David's soul had been dark for a time, and the craving 
 tenderness which had no longer any outlet, was as a tu- 
 multuous flood engulfing her consciousness. Then, when 
 the winter months added their dreariness to her inward 
 desolation, came Judy and carried her off by force; and, 
 having conveyed her safely to clear skies, sunshine, and an 
 azure sea, sought to lift her out of the flood with counsels 
 of robust wisdom. Judith did not speak of Cranley-Chance, 
 of his death or the scenes which had preceded it; but she 
 spoke constantly of Vi, knowing well that it was just of Vi 
 that Vi's mother found it hard to speak; till at last, in 
 answering words, the flood at David's heart found vent. 
 
 It was the end of April now, eight months since Vi had 
 died, and spring, in this forward southern land, was hurry- 
 ing into summer. It was time to be moving to a cooler 
 climate, and David and Judith had decided to spend a few 
 weeks in North Italy before going back to England. David 
 had been taking her last look at the Mediterranean in the 
 cooler hour that comes with the sunset, and came back to 
 the hotel intending to finish the preparations for to- 
 morrow's journey. 
 
 But when she reached her room, the preparations were 
 delayed, for she found a letter from Lady Lowther waiting 
 for her, and sat down to read it before taking off her hat. 
 Her mother did not write long letters, and this letter was 
 not long ; yet she sat with it in her hand till the bell rang
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 for table d'hote, and when Judy knocked at her door, was 
 not ready to go down. 
 
 "What have you been up to packing?" Judy asked, 
 coming into the room. 
 
 "No, just lazing, I'm afraid." 
 
 "Any letters?" 
 
 "One from mother, that's all. Had you?" 
 
 "Nothing personal; official ones, of course. It's high 
 time I was back, David. Deputies are all very well, but 
 they really give one almost as much work certainly quite 
 as much writing as if one were on the spot." 
 
 "I should feel guilty," said David, "if I did not know 
 that you needed a change quite as much as I did." 
 
 "Perhaps. I was getting a bit stale, I do think. But 
 I'm quite ready now to plunge into the fray again." 
 
 "Would you rather go straight home give up Italy ?" 
 
 "No, because I think it's better for you to see a little 
 of Italy before you go back. You'd like it, wouldn't you?" 
 
 "Oh, I? I believe I should like never to go back at all. 
 So a few weeks more or less won't make much difference." 
 
 "I'll tell you what we'll do," said Judy after a minute's 
 silence. "We'll go to Venice for a week, then just have a 
 look at Florence and Pisa, and then make for Paris. There 
 is a good deal I can do there, ai)d while I work, you can 
 sight-see. You don't know Paris at allj do yu?" 
 
 "Hardly at all, so I should like that very much." 
 
 David gave a little sigh of relief; she was in the mood 
 to like anything which put off her return to England ; and 
 she left Cannes the next day feeling that a sure barrier of 
 weeks lay between her and home. 
 
 Judith knew Venice well, but it was new to David, and 
 the delight she took in it lifted her for a time above the 
 level of troubled and troublesome thoughts. She had
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 285 
 
 sketched a little at Cannes, and here she was fired to greater 
 effort, more careful endeavour. Painting day by day, her 
 girlhood's years, her girlhood's ambitions and intentions 
 leapt up at her out of the past. Sometimes the bridge 
 between then and now; her wifehood, motherhood, the 
 pictures that flamed out in her memory, seemed like the 
 phantoms of a dream, unsubstantial, illusory; and youth 
 looked no further back than yesterday. Sometimes she 
 wished that it might be so, that the bridge might crumble 
 into nothingness, that she might find her girlhood a reality 
 and her life all before her; and then again she knew that 
 there were parts of her past she could not bear to lose. She 
 was able now to face that past impartially, and, looking 
 back, found herself able, too, to look forward. 
 
 Yet here at Venice, she chose rather to look back than 
 forward. The waves of past storms were sinking out of 
 sight; but ahead were ripples or so it seemed to her 
 which might raise themselves to billows and sweep her from 
 the still waters of her present peace into the tumult of fresh 
 emotions. In Lady Lowther's letter she had first caught 
 the murmur of those waves, and the sound bore a subtle 
 charm ; but it was just the charm, the hint of magic in the 
 murmur, which caused her to shrink from the waves' ap- 
 proach. Storms she felt that she could face, and she was 
 prepared to brave her father's sarcasms and her friends' 
 disapproval by espousing an unpopular cause. She was not 
 without the fighting instinct, or the chivalry which prefers 
 to fight with the minority; and in battle she hoped to find 
 an interest which would help to fill her life. Happiness she 
 did not deliberately look for; and now happiness stood, as 
 it were, at the side of the life she had planned out; stood 
 and beckoned. 
 
 Long ago, happiness of the kind that to a woman is
 
 286 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 supreme had shown itself in swift, dissolving vision ; it was 
 linked in her mind with a balcony that overlooked a London 
 street, and the scent of flowers floating out from a room 
 behind. She had refused all through the years of her mar- 
 riage to look back at it; though the sordid curtain which 
 had at first hidden it from her eyes had long ago been rent 
 into nothingness; and though it had come from time to 
 time and peeped, as it were, over her shoulder. And now, 
 lo! instead of standing behind her, it was there ahead; a 
 dim outline, to be sure, but an outline that showed a raised, 
 inviting hand. 
 
 Lady Lowther had sketched the outline first, with a 
 stroke or two of her pen, a couple of sentences hi the letter 
 which David had received on the evening before she left 
 Cannes. 
 
 "Dr. Gale was here this afternoon, and we talked of you. 
 I am sure he cares for you still." Those were the sentences 
 which David had read with a little sudden rush of joy, and 
 which, as she had re-read them, as she had thought about 
 them since, had caused her to shrink from the thought of 
 going back to London. For she could never marry Sidney 
 Gale; he belonged to one camp and she to the other; they 
 could meet only to cross swords. 
 
 For the second time she must turn her back on the hap- 
 piness she had missed long ago ; and, knowing what she had 
 to do, she shrank from what she might undergo in the 
 doing it. It had not been very hard to crush that girl's 
 love, hardly developed beyond the bud of fancy, and a cur- 
 rent of opposing feeling had helped to sweep it away. But 
 now, if it should rise afresh, it might be of robuster growth, 
 strong with the strength of her own maturity, hard to 
 destroy. The only way was to fight it from the first, not
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 287 
 
 to give in to the thought of it; to avoid, above all things, 
 everything which might initiate or aid its growth. David, 
 setting her face towards England, determined that she 
 would have nothing at all to do with Sidney Gale.
 
 CHAPTER XLII 
 
 AFTER the old-world atmosphere that clings to Italy, 
 the attractions of Paris seemed, all and only, those 
 of luxury, of convenience, of stir and movement, of modem 
 brilliance. That was at first. By and by David made 
 acquaintance with the museums and galleries, with streets 
 and quarters which lie outside the range of the shopping 
 tourist, with the encircling beauties of St. Cloud, of Ver- 
 sailles, of Fontainebleau. 
 
 She was partly aided, partly hindered, in her expeditions 
 and rambles by Edgar Hall, whose card was brought to her 
 two days after she and Judy had arrived at the Hotel 
 St. James. 
 
 "How tiresome!" was her first thought; and her second: 
 "I wonder how he knew I was here?" 
 
 She gave vent to this latter thought almost as she shook 
 hands with Hall. 
 
 "I had a letter from Percy Burdon, and he told me." 
 
 "The irrepressible Percy!" exclaimed David to herself; 
 aloud she said: "Do you still correspond with him?" 
 
 "He corresponds with me, and occasionally I write to 
 him. That, I'm afraid, is the position." 
 
 "It was very kind of you to come." 
 
 "I could not let you be in Paris without paying my 
 respects. I have always had a great admiration and respect 
 for your father. I respected and admired your husband." 
 
 Hall spoke accurately; David had always been for him
 
 Lowther's daughter, Chance's wife ; never the girl who had 
 been Burden's favourite companion, the woman whom both 
 Gale and Chance had loved. He had come to see her simply 
 because he looked upon her as a sort of female appendage 
 of two scientific men, to whose gifts and work he desired 
 to pay tribute. But, as he talked, her own individual per- 
 sonality began to dawn upon him ; something of the charm 
 which, years ago in her girlhood, had appealed to Cranley- 
 Chance, appealed now, vaguely, to Edgar Hall. He had 
 intended to pay her a formal visit, feeling that when that 
 visit was paid the whole duty of a busy man had been 
 accomplished ; he found himself, before he went away, ask- 
 ing her if she would like to see through the Pasteur Insti- 
 tute. 
 
 He was three quarters relieved and one quarter disap- 
 pointed when David refused. On the way home he found 
 himself wondering why she had flushed over her refusal, 
 why in her speech, easy and direct throughout the inter- 
 view, there had been a spasm of hesitation. 
 
 "No, thank you." The flush had come as she began to 
 speak. "I don't care" and here had come the hesitation 
 "to to see such things." 
 
 Yet Cranley-Chance, and Lowther too, had always told 
 him that she was more keenly and more intelligently inter- 
 ested in science than most women. "I don't care to to 
 see such things." Ah, perhaps Hall laughed to himself 
 perhaps she thought she was going to be shown the sub- 
 jects of his experiments. What an idea ! Should he write 
 and tell her that visitors to the Institute saw nothing that 
 could shock the most delicate sensibilities? He did not 
 think any the worse of her for shrinking from the sight of 
 pain : she was a woman, and in women nothing much mat- 
 tered. But what an absurd idea !
 
 290 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 When David told Judith of the invitation, Judith said 
 at once, "You should have gone. Always see everything 
 you can." 
 
 "I don't suppose I should have seen much." 
 
 "No, of course you wouldn't. Nobody ever does, any- 
 where. You may go through the laboratories of the big 
 wholesale chemists and through the Stansted farms, and 
 come out saying, 'How painless! how delightful! how 
 beautifully kept! how admirably managed!' and for all 
 that has been shown you, so they are. Nevertheless, it is 
 useful sometimes to see even the outside of the cup and 
 platter." 
 
 "I thought it might lead to controversy, and I don't 
 want controversy with Edgar Hall. No doubt Percy has 
 told him what has happened, but there's no good in dis- 
 cussing it." 
 
 "Still, discussion " 
 
 "I'll do," David broke in, "whatever you like, and I'll 
 talk too, when talking is likely to be of any value. But 
 ifs absolute waste of energy to talk to people like Edgar 
 Hall." 
 
 "I agree, so I'll say no more, though if it had been 
 
 I " Judith laughed. "But of course, he would never 
 
 have paid me the compliment." 
 
 But Percy Burdon, in writing to Hall, had not men- 
 tioned his cousin's change of attitude, and Hall, when he 
 saw David again, did not speak of his scientific interests, 
 and did not, therefore, discover it for himself. For he did 
 see her again; not once, but many times. There was a 
 lull at this time in his labours; that is to say, that he was 
 more engaged in thinking out processes, weighing possibili- 
 ties, than in performing actual experiments; and he found
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 291 
 
 it in no wise inimical to reflection to escort David to remote 
 parts of the city and its surroundings. 
 
 The joint rambles began by his offering to pilot her 
 through all that remained of the once famous Latin Quar- 
 ter, and David, touched by what she considered his gener- 
 osity towards her pervert self, accepted the offer. Then he 
 suggested, in such hours as his professor's work left free, 
 expedition after expedition, and David, finding no plausible 
 excuse for refusing his company, accepted it sometimes 
 when she would rather have been alone. She was a woman 
 who, when intent upon observation, spoke little, who, when 
 enjoying artistically, cared to speak of her enjoyment only 
 to a companion with whom she was entirely in sympathy; 
 and there was a fundamental difference of outlook between 
 herself and Edo-ar Hall which forbade, she felt, any but a 
 purely surface intercourse. Nevertheless, seeing that he did 
 not approach controversial topics, seeing that he was con- 
 tent to be silent when silence was the only satisfactory 
 substitute for intimate speech, she did not find it in her 
 heart to refuse the escort he offered. 
 
 To tentative remonstrance on Judy's part she turned a 
 deaf ear. "What harm am I doing?" she asked. "It isn't 
 as if there were any principle involved in walking down 
 a boulevard with a man who recognises that you hate what 
 he most approves of ; it isn't as if I denied my convictions. 
 But I no more compromise my cause by putting up with 
 his company for that's what it comes to than he injures 
 his unfortunately by frequenting mine. If Pm doing 
 anything, I'm doing good, by showing him how nice an 
 anti-vivisectionist can be." 
 
 Judy shook her head, and David did not appreciate the 
 significance of her rejoinder that she might perhaps have 
 taken the same view at David's age.
 
 292 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Hall, meanwhile, was quite unconscious that in avoiding 
 the mention of his particular interests, he was avoiding 
 pitfalls of opinion. He cared to discuss science only with 
 scientists, and the fact that David did not try to talk up to 
 him, as he would have put it, impressed him favourably. 
 He had always told himself that there were but two kinds 
 of women he could marry : one possessing the qualities of 
 a domestic mistress and no others; the other, one of those 
 rare women who would sacrifice sex to science and enter 
 into his pursuits with the zeal and hardihood of a comrade. 
 Now he began to think that there might be a third type; 
 a woman independent enough to have pursuits of her own, 
 intelligent enough to follow them without making demands 
 on his time and attention ; feminine in her allures (he used 
 the expressive French word to himself) ; discreet and tact- 
 ful; physically desirable. 
 
 Hall, occupied with the study of the human body as a 
 complex organism, had had no time to give to the consider- 
 ation of relations between the sexes other than those directly 
 animal. He was acquainted with the secrets of a woman's 
 frame, but ignorant- of those appertaining to her nature; 
 he could discourse upon her physical instincts, but knew 
 nothing of her intuitional tastes. It was then, perhaps, not 
 to be wondered at that he was imperceptive of David's at- 
 titude towards him; that he measured her feelings by his 
 own ; that he construed her passive acceptance of his com- 
 panionship into an active wish to perpetuate it. Borne on 
 by desire, he failed to recognise that she remained station- 
 ary in indifference; becoming restless, her tranquillity 
 seemed to him the counterfeit calm of unavowed expecta- 
 tion. 
 
 Yet his heart beat as it beat when fresh discovery was 
 imminent, the day that he entered her presence with the
 
 293 
 
 intention of definitely ratifying what seemed to him the 
 bond between them. 
 
 It was late afternoon, and David eat in the window, the 
 clear spring light falling on her brown hair and charming 
 face, on the daintiness of her gown and the bunch of violets 
 she wore at her breast. Hall was not artist enough to know 
 that the violdts were fastened with an artist hand, that the 
 black dress with its touches of white was prettily made and 
 prettily worn : he only knew that the woman in the window 
 was sweet to look upon, and that he all man for the 
 moment, and scientist not at all wanted her for his own. 
 
 David rose, gently ruffled ; she was interested in her book, 
 and did not want to be disturbed. But the book was pres- 
 ently forgotten, and the vexation swamped in amazement; 
 an amazement so obviously genuine that Hall could not 
 doubt its honesty. 
 
 "That you should think," said David, "of marrying a 
 woman with my views, seems to me almost as extraordinary 
 as that you should imagine for a moment that I could 
 dream of marrying a man with yours." 
 
 "I am stupid, I suppose, but I don't understand." 
 
 "Didn't Percy tell you, when he wrote?" 
 
 "Nothing about you, except that you were here." 
 
 "I'm sorry, because you've misunderstood all along. I 
 
 should have told you if I'd thought for an instant 
 
 But I supposed you wished to ignore it all, and to meet 
 on neutral ground." 
 
 Then she told him, and saw his lip curl in the way she 
 remembered; yet he was mad enough in that moment of 
 disappointment to plead that as neutrality had availed so 
 far, it might prove a permanent meeting-place. 
 
 But there was in David no answering madness to
 
 294 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 strengthen the plea, and she dismissed it at once with a 
 decision there was no mistaking. 
 
 "I suppose," said Hall, standing before her, "that to 
 Mrs. Home belongs the honour of this conversion." 
 
 "No. Mrs. Home tried to influence, me, but I set my 
 face against her influence. It was two men who converted 
 me ; my husband and yourself." 
 
 "Ah?" 
 
 "Yes, I saw him I can't, and I needn't, go into it now 
 I saw him at his work. He died as the result of yours. 
 Oh, I don't mean," she said in quick apology, "yours per- 
 sonally. I mean the system you represent this Pasteur- 
 ism." 
 
 Then Hall forgot his love. He drew a step nearer. 
 "How dare you-?" he said. "How dare you?" 
 
 "Surely you heard how he died and why. And Sir 
 James Carey who was really bitten, but not inoculated 
 is alive and well." 
 
 "To charge an individual case a mistake, probably, a 
 blunder to a system, is infamous." 
 
 " A scientist should discount no single case. But I don't 
 mind. How is it that in* India, since the introduction of 
 Pasteurism, the mortality from- hydrophobia has gone up ? 
 How is it that in every country, even- in this, the country 
 of its birth, Pasteurism and an increased death-rate from 
 hydrophobia always go hand-in-hand?" 1 Suddenly David's 
 voice changed, and from her eyes, which met those other 
 eyes that blazed, the anger died out. "Don't let us quarrel. 
 What's the good? You see," she said, with a half smile, 
 "how little suited I am to be your wife." 
 
 Hall turned away; he made no answer; in that instant 
 he hardly knew whether he loved or hated her. 
 
 *App. 33.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 295 
 
 Afterwards he told himself that in a life such as his, a 
 woman could hold no large or lasting place; and in truth 
 the pang that David had inflicted left no abiding hurt; 
 by and by he reached the point of assuring himself that he 
 had had a fortunate escape. 
 
 David, left alone, passed a wretched hour, reproaching 
 herself first for her blindness, and then for having lost her 
 temper; and Judy's "I expected it" did not tend to soothe 
 her. 
 
 That night she lay long awake, but her thoughts were 
 not all of Hall. It was chiefly that sentence in Lady 
 Lowther's letter which came between her and sleep. It had 
 been easy to say no to Hall. It would not be easy yet 
 fully as imperative to say no to Sidney Gale. Yet was 
 she not disturbing herself unnecessarily ? She would never 
 be called upon to answer one way or the other : for even if 
 her mother were not mistaken, if he did "care still," he 
 would see as clearly as she did that there was an impassable 
 barrier between them.
 
 CHAPTER XLIII 
 
 GALE, in truth, was prepared to take the course which! 
 David had mapped out, but for a reason far other 
 than that which she assigned to him ; far other, and yet, in 
 a sense, the same. 
 
 During her absence, Gale had been driven out into the 
 wilderness and there tempted of the devil; and, returning 
 to the beaten ways of men, he had returned, as it seemed to 
 him, to a path which led far away from that which David 
 had elected to tread. 
 
 Not into every life comes this crisis, for the spirit must 
 have reached a certain stage of growth ere it be strong 
 enough to drive a man forth from his familiar haunts into 
 ,the lonely place where he finds only himself ; a dual mani- 
 festation, higher and lower; and between the two a decisive 
 parting of the ways. The spirit had cried for long to Gale ; 
 faintly at first, then louder ; but he would not heed it. He 
 sought to shut his ears, to close his eyes ; yet the eyes would 
 not be blinded, nor the ears grow deaf ; and at last he was 
 driven forth from the city of conventional standards to 
 face the sum of his lower longings, called, in the language 
 of concrete presentment, Satan. 
 
 This Satan endowed him first with an added power of 
 imaginative vision : he saw, as from a pinnacle of conscious- 
 ness, all that, would he but make Satan his god, he might 
 achieve. Ambition, as has been said, was one of the strong- 
 est forces in Gale's character; and he saw himself famous. 
 
 296
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 297 
 
 Already he stood upon the lower slopes of the mountain of 
 success ; he had but to pursue his present path and he could 
 not fail to mount to the very summit, said the devil softly, 
 and Gale knew the words were true. Fame might be his, 
 with its double crown of successful achievement and the ad- 
 miring esteem of other men ; and, at fame's feet, wealth. 
 
 Eiches for mere riches' sake he hardly desired, but there 
 are few men to whom wealth in one guise or another is not 
 welcome, and Gale was not of these. Money was presented 
 to him, here in the wilderness, as a means of accomplish- 
 ment : he could accomplish a vast deal more of value to the 
 world if he went on in his present way, than could possibly 
 be achieved by taking up the arms and accoutrements of a 
 crank. He could do more good with the wealth he would 
 win, than by vain protestations against an established 
 order. Then said the god within him: "What is good?" 
 and the devil, for. answer, showed him from his pinnacle 
 failure instead of fame ; failure that could not but be bitter ; 
 more bitter to Gale, perhaps, than to most men, since he 
 held already the title to success. Was it imperative to court 
 it? necessary to proclaim aloud theories which would pro- 
 voke its descent? 
 
 He knew well that there were numbers of medical men, 
 doubting as he had doubted; numbers convinced of the 
 immorality, and even, certain of them, of the inefficacy of 
 modern methods of research ; numbers, again, as careless of 
 the whole subject as is the generality of the lay public : and 
 he knew that all these men, silent, some as to their doubts, 
 others as to their convictions, went on with the practical 
 work of healing, leaving the question of research to those 
 chiefly concerned with it. He knew that their silence was 
 due, when it was not the result of indifference, to the fear 
 that speech would mean failure, if not in the lower ranks
 
 298 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 of the profession, certainly in its higher branches. He 
 knew that the priests of that progress on whose altar are 
 sacrificed blood sacrifices, would refuse admittance, even to 
 the outer court of their temple, to all who were not prepared 
 to worship in like fashion with themselves. And he knew 
 that, standing where he now stood, the mere absence of 
 denial would be construed as an affirmation of belief. 
 
 But for Gale there was no middle course ; the choice that 
 lay before him was to qualify deliberately for priesthood or 
 definitely to declare himself a rebel. Rebellion meant fail- 
 ure for a man with a consulting practice. And what else? 
 
 Beside the splendid heights to which ambition pointed, 
 he saw a dearer prospect, a sweeter gain. He had lost David 
 once, but he might win her now ; in his manhood the dream 
 of his youth might find fulfilment. Unknown then, he was 
 spoken of now as a man with a future, a career; Lowther 
 himself would no longer despise him as a son-in-law, and 
 David there was that in her attitude towards him which 
 surely he could kindle into love. 
 
 But this could be only if he subscribed to the professional 
 creed, followed the professional practice. To abandon these 
 meant to abandon David. He knew nothing of what she 
 had gone through, nothing of the change which experience 
 had wrought in her; he only knew what she herself had 
 told him nearly two years ago in Harley Street. All that 
 he cared for lay within the area of orthodoxy ; and he was 
 of the men who care much. His love was as compelling as 
 his ambition was strong; into it was gathered all the ro- 
 mance of a nature in which the Highland blood of ancestors 
 still wrought a spell; and in the glamour of that spell he 
 looked on David's face and longed after it. 
 
 Then in the wilderness, beset with longing, beguiled by 
 hope, there was shown to him, in the mirage that comes
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 299 
 
 only in desert places, a vision. He saw the covering of 
 cant, convention, custom, rent from the usages of vivisec- 
 tional science, and those usages clear in. their nakedness. 
 He saw might scorning right, scoffing at chivalry, despising 
 pity; discerning in weakness nothing save advantage to 
 itself; finding in trust no hindrance to betrayal. He saw 
 knowledge seeking to understand all mysteries, puffed up, 
 vaunting itself, dazzling men's eyes with prophecies of 
 wonders to come. He saw laid upon the altar of man's 
 suffering, a barrier in man's pathway of progress which no 
 made the victims of his tyranny ; saw them, a veritable army 
 of martyrs, born as man is born, to work their way through 
 the evolutionary process, and forming, in their defenceless 
 suffering, a barrier in man's pathway of progress which no 
 knowledge can overthrow. And laid with them upon that 
 altar, he saw the principles of justice and of mercy; not 
 girt about with the garments of expediency or gain or rel- 
 ative values, but bare principles, as they lie at the heart of 
 nature; as they shine in the diadem of that love whose 
 transmutation of all baser tilings into itself is the supreme 
 achievement of a vaster science than is known to the 
 slaughtering priests; "the dim, far-off event, to which the 
 whole creation moves." 
 
 Seeing all this, the god in him came forth boldly; and 
 lo ! the desert was a garden, and after the fierce heat, it was 
 the cool of the evening.
 
 CHAPTEK XLIV 
 
 A STRANGE and wondrous thing befell soon after 
 David had settled into the small house in Con- 
 naught Street, which she had chosen in preference to living 
 on in the large one in Manchester Square. Lady Lowther 
 gave a tea-party. 
 
 A school friend of hers and Miss Barker's had returned 
 to England after long residence in Canada, had looked 
 up her old acquaintances, and had been entertained by Miss 
 Barker at lunch; and Bertha Lowther felt that it was in- 
 cumbent upon her also to offer a measure of hospitality. 
 Dinner was out of the question, for Lowther, fastidious in 
 regard to women, as are many of the men who rate them 
 low, was disposed to be contemptuous of his wife's friends, 
 and could not be expected to be interested in, and conse- 
 quently courteous to, a stout lady whose greying hair had 
 a tendency to stray from hairpin limits, and who looked at 
 the world through spectacles. Luncheon, for the same 
 reason, was not to be ventured upon; so Bertha was con- 
 strained to ask her friend only to tea ; and in order to make 
 the entertainment more of an entertainment, invited, be- 
 sides David and Miss Barker, some six or eight of the ladies 
 with whom she had a visiting acquaintance. 
 
 Since David had come on that troubled evening to Harley 
 Street, and the long reserve between mother and daughter 
 had been broken, Bertha had been conscious of a keener 
 interest in life, a renewal of spirit. Perhaps the sense 
 
 300
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 301 
 
 that she was free of the bond under which Lowther had 
 placed her, had something to do with the change in her; or 
 it may be that, finding courage to tell him of the under- 
 standing between herself and David, courage had never 
 ebbed so low again, as in the days when she had been cut 
 off from the sympathy of both husband and daughter. In 
 those days a tea-party would have been an unmitigated trial 
 to her shrinking shyness; now it was more than half a 
 pleasure. She was mildly excited over the number and 
 nature of the cakes to be provided ; she was wholly pleased 
 when, on the day of the party, David arrived soon after 
 breakfast with an armful of flowers, and proceeded to place 
 them in vases about the room. 
 
 David had to promise to return early, very early, in the 
 afternoon, so that no alarming guest might precede the 
 support of her presence; and in order to preserve her 
 mother's mind from perturbation, she reached Harley 
 Street an hour before anybody was invited. 
 
 She met Lowther .on the doorstep. Since Cranley- 
 Chance's death, and more especially since the death of Vi, 
 his anger towards her had lost much of its bitterness. See- 
 ing that she did not speak of her opinions, had not in. any 
 way proclaimed them, he had mentally removed her from 
 the region of treacherous antagonism to that of harmless 
 lunacy; and knowing the profound grief she had suffered 
 in the loss of Vi, his real affection had constrained him to 
 treat her with gentleness. But his pride; in her was gone, 
 and she knew that she had sunk for ever below the level of 
 his intellectual recognition-. 
 
 He greeted her kindly, her -black dress and a pathos 
 which was now often in her eyes somehow making appeal 
 to him; and David answered him gaily, glad of the smile 
 on his face.
 
 302 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "I've come to the tea-party," she said. "Are you aware 
 that her ladyship is at home this afternoon?" Lowther 
 liked his title, she knew, and any allusion to it. 
 
 "At home ? Good Lord ! Who to ?" asked he. 
 
 "An old friend of her own, and the wives of certain 
 friends of yours; and me." 
 
 "That Home woman's not coming, I hope? I've told 
 your mother I wouldn't have her in the house." 
 
 "The Home woman is not the least likely to come where 
 she isn't welcome even if she had been asked, which she 
 hasn't been. So don't be afraid." 
 
 la spite of all that had happened, David had not quite 
 lost the habit of standing up to her father, and for the re- 
 tention of that habit Lowther, in his soul, respected her; 
 it was, in his opinion, the sole claim to respect which she 
 still possessed. 
 
 "Well, I suppose women like to be shut up together, and 
 drink tea and chatter. Bad for their nerves, but " 
 
 The wave of his hand proclaimed the sex's impervious- 
 ness to reason. 
 
 "So different from men," said David. She was thinking 
 of the coterie to which her father belonged, who met to- 
 gether, not, to be sure, in. drawing-rooms, but in studies 
 and clubs; and Lowther knew her thought, and laughed. 
 Then, as he got into his brougham, he sighed. If only his 
 daughter hadn't made such a fool of herself ! 
 
 Upstairs Lady Lowther was waiting, a lace fichu soften- 
 ing the hard lines of her stiff bodice. A fain colour came 
 into her cheeks as David's eyes fell on the fichu, but she was 
 reassured when David cried out 
 
 "Why, mother, how nice you look!" 
 
 She began to wish she had left her hair a little fuller in 
 the front. She had loosened it ere she put on her cap, and
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 303 
 
 surveyed the effect for half a minute with pondering eyes, 
 then had brushed it back into its usual flat tightness. Now 
 but it was too late. 
 
 "I'm glad you don't think I look too much got up," she 
 said; and David laughed aloud. 
 
 "Is she a widow, this Mrs. Chandler?" she asked pres- 
 ently, "or is there a Mr.?" 
 
 "Yes/there's a Mr., but he hasn't come over with her. 
 She thought she'd like to come home and see her family and 
 her friends, and he couldn't arrange to come with her." 
 
 "Were you very intimate as girls?" 
 
 "Oh fairly. She was rather pretty, and very poetical, 
 and I used to admire her. She had fancy names for all 
 the girls, and I thought it so clever of her to invent them. 
 Though I don't know," added Lady Lowther, "that they 
 were always very appropriate." 
 
 "What did she call you, mother?" 
 
 "She called me Dawn it sounds so absurd now be- 
 cause she said I was so rosy (I had rosy cheeks as a girl) 
 and innocent." 
 
 "Some dawns are horrid," said David; "not rosy at all." 
 
 "Yes, of course; but Claire Selby, as she was then, never 
 thought of anything of that kind. She used to say, I 
 remember, that the true poet was joyful ; and her name for 
 herself was Optima. She said it was the feminine of op- 
 timist, and I dare say it was. I have sometimes wondered 
 what sort of a life she has had." 
 
 David soon discovered that Mrs. Chandler's life, whatever 
 it had been, had allowed her to remain poetical, for one of 
 the first questions she asked her school friend's daughter 
 was whether she was fond of nature. 
 
 David felt that her reply, "Yes, very," was one of inade- 
 quate banality.
 
 304 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 It appeared, however, to satisfy Mrs. Chandler, who 
 surveyed her smilingly. "I love nature," she said, "sun- 
 sets and birds and the tints of autumn, especially birds! 
 But alas ! cold winter kills so many of them." 
 
 "Yes, I always put out crumbs," said David, wfth the 
 pleasurable sensation of treading on firm ground. 
 
 But Mrs. Chandler shook her head, and laid two fingers 
 in gentle reproval on David's hand. "No, no, my dear. 
 Nature gives and withholds. I never run the risk of 
 bronchitis in order to thwart her plans." 
 
 "What nonsense, Claire!" exclaimed Miss Barker, who 
 drew near with a sugar basin in one hand and a milk jug 
 in the other. "You might just as well say that we ought 
 to camp out because nature hasn't provided us with houses." 
 
 "Dear Isabel !" said Mrs. Chandler, "you always took 
 such a prosaic view. I used to call her East Wind," she 
 said to David, "because she was so cutting." 
 
 Miss Barker gave a little grunt; a sound that David was 
 used to call "Doggie's growl." "It seems to me," she said, 
 "that whenever people want to be selfish or unkind they 
 always quote nature. No offence to you, Claire, for I 
 know you don't mean to be unkind; you never did. But 
 as a girl you were apt to talk over your own head." 
 
 For the first time Mrs. Chandler looked ruffled, and 
 David was thankful when her mother's timid voice recalled" 
 Miss Barker to the tea-tray. 
 
 Mrs. Chandler very soon recovered herself. 
 
 "I adored that woman," she said presently. "As girls 
 we were almost inseparable, though I was often wounded 
 by her sweeping denunciations. We were like the ivy and 
 the oak she rugged, I clinging. When I lunched with 
 her the other day we seemed to resume our old relations 
 without an eifort."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 305 
 
 "How delightful!" said David. 
 
 " She never had my sensitiveness," Mrs. Chandler purred 
 on, "but her proeaic common sense controlled my perhaps 
 too ardent imagination. I required, I dare say, the bracing 
 influence of my East Wind friend." 
 
 A lady crossed the room and took the vacant chair on 
 David's other side. 
 
 "I've been longing for a word with you," she said. "I 
 know how progressive you are, and I want you to come and 
 support my husband on the ninth. I don't know whether 
 you've heard ! He's going to* hold a debate with the no- 
 torious Mrs. Home." 
 
 "A debate between a man and a woman? Dear me! 
 How interesting !" said Mrs. Chandler. "May I inquire the 
 subject ?" 
 
 "Oh, vivisection, of course," answered Mrs. Betterton, 
 in a tone and with a look which said, "Where on earth do 
 you hail from that you should need to ask?" "You will 
 come, dear Mrs. Chance?" 
 
 "I quite mean to go." David hesitated for a bare 
 instant. "Mrs. Home is an old friend of mine." 
 
 "Dear me! I hope I haven't Of course, when I 
 
 said notorious I dare say she may be quite genuine ; 
 
 but so many of those anti-vivisectionist women take it up 
 simply to get themselves noticed." 
 
 "Yes, you may take it from me that she's quite genuine," 
 said David. 
 
 "How distressing for you that she should have gone in 
 for these views ! I'm thankful to say I have no friends who 
 do not agree with me. I almost wonder, dear Mrs. Chance, 
 that you can bear to go to the debate." 
 
 Again, for a fraction of a minute, David hesitated ; there 
 are few people who are able without some shrinking to
 
 306 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 brave the public opinion of their own particular world. 
 David, in hers, had ranked as being unusually intelligent 
 and advanced, as having a logical mind and a balanced, 
 judgment ; it was not without a pang that she stepped down 
 from the position she had gained. But she stepped, when 
 she did step, firmly. 
 
 "I am going," she said, "to support Mrs. Home, because 
 I have come to her way of thinking." 
 
 Mrs. Betterton looked so completely bewildered that 
 David, in her nervousness, nearly laughed. Mrs. Chandler 
 took advantage of the pause in the conversation. 
 
 "Surely," she said, "your father's daughter cannot hold 
 such views. Sir Bernard's name is known to us in Canada, 
 and all that it implies." 
 
 "I can't answer for father's daughter," said David, try- 
 ing to speak lightly. "That abstract creature no doubt 
 ought to think precisely as he does. Fm speaking now as 
 a concrete self, an individual in its own right." 
 
 "May I inquire," asked Mrs. Betterton, passing slowly 
 from stupor to irony, "what has caused this if I may so 
 put it volte-face'?" 
 
 "You certainly have a right to ask, since I was once so 
 strong on the other side. It is simply that I am persuaded 
 that vivisection is cruel, and persuaded also that of all 
 immorality cruelty is the most immoral." 
 
 "You forget," said Mrs. Betterton, "the seventh com- 
 mandment." 
 
 "Nature is cruel," purred Mrs. Chandler. 
 
 "I don't forget, either nature or the seventh command- 
 ment. But adultery is a sin of the flesh, and cruelty is a 
 sin of the spirit. As for Nature, she has never wrought a 
 tithe of the cruelty caused by civilisation." 
 
 "It is absurd," said Mrs. Betterton, bristling, "to say
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 307 
 
 that vivisectors are cruel. Just think of the splendid men 
 who employ vivisection, of the famous names !" 
 
 The other conversations had ceased by this- time, and 
 the attention of the company was confined to the disputants. 
 Lady Lowther, looking very nervous, longed for her knit- 
 ting, but David had hidden it carefully away before the 
 arrival of the guests, and the tremulous hands could only 
 crumple folds in the grey dress. 
 
 "To call such men cruel," said the wife of a famous 
 surgeon, "is a libel." 
 
 " Cruel to be kind," murmured the voice of her who loved 
 nature. 
 
 The platitude roused something in David which changed 
 her half-deprecating attitude into one of distinct aggression. 
 
 "Cruel to the defenceless to be kind to the strong," she 
 said. "I call that the coward's way. You might as well 
 praise a man who robs a weaker than himself in order to 
 give a Christmas present to his wife." 
 
 She got up ; it seemed easier somehow to speak standing 
 than sitting, and stood with her hand resting on the back 
 of the chair from which she had risen. "They say that a 
 convert, or a pervert, is always better or worse as you 
 choose to view it than an .original holder of any faith; 
 keener, at any rate. I think that must be because people 
 who change think more about the thing they change in than 
 those who accept creeds without questioning. I thought 
 once as you all think here." 
 
 Lady Lowther swallowed something in her throat, half 
 opened her mouth, and shut it again in silence. 
 
 "Except me," said Miss Barker. 
 
 "And just because of that, I suppose, I feel particularly 
 strongly on the other side. It's difficult to speak in a com- 
 pany like this without going into what may seem like
 
 308 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 personalities; but, as I have to explain the change in my 
 views, I'd like to say some of the things I think; and I 
 don't mean to be personal I want to speak generally. It 
 is argued, I know, that if a man is famous and clever and 
 distinguished and and domestic, nice to his wife and all 
 that, he can't be cruel. I know, because I used to argue 
 that way myself. But in thinking it over, I see that men, 
 have been all those things; good to their wives and chil- 
 dren, and clever and amiable and charming; and yet have 
 done all sorts of things that are considered wrong. Some- 
 times they've been making away with money entrusted to 
 them, for years before they've been found out, and some- 
 times they've been leading a double life, and sometimes 
 they've been the prey of a secret vice. But if they are found 
 out, nobody says that because they were good fathers and 
 husbands or great statesmen or what not, the things they 
 did couldn't have been wrong. When they have done any- 
 thing that society recognises as a crime, society has no 
 mercy on them; it doesn't judge the things that are done 
 by the men who do them, but it judges the men by the 
 things they do. It is only, I have noticed, where cruelty is 
 concerned that the judgment is turned upside down; and 
 it is, I am sure, because so few people really feel that 
 cruelty is wrong. They think it wrong to steal or to murder 
 or to dance on Sundays, but they don't think it wrong to 
 hurt animals if they're going to get anything by hurting 
 them. They only think cruelty is wrong if it is wanton, if 
 there is nothing to be gained by it; indeed, unless it is 
 wanton, they won't even call it cruelty. And that is why 
 vivisection is propped up by the names of the men who do 
 it; not that it isn't cruel, but that people ddn't realise that 
 cruelty, in its very self, apart from whether you gain or 
 don't gain by it, is a sin. I've thought about this for a
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 309 
 
 long time now, and I feel it so strongly that I I'm obliged 
 to say it." 
 
 David's voice faltered at the end, and her last words 
 came lamely. When she sat down she was trembling all 
 over and her face burned painfully. 
 
 Her seating herself was the signal for all the guests, ex- 
 cept Mrs. Chandler and Isabel Barker, to rise. 
 
 "I am surprised," said Mrs. Betterton, "and I must 
 say, shocked. Such an attack on the profession !" 
 
 "I agree with you," said the surgeon's wife. "And I 
 am so sorry," she added, advancing with outstretched hand 
 to Lady Lowther, "for you." 
 
 Lady Lowther's face justified the name with which Mrs. 
 Chandler's poetic fancy had in their school days endowed 
 her, for she flushed a vivid pink. She tried to speak, then 
 choked, then tried again, and this time succeeded. 
 
 "I I I side with my daughter," she said; and looked 
 past her guesfs to David. 
 
 When most of those guests had melted away, Mrs. 
 Chandler was disposed to discuss the situation with regard 
 to its bearing on nature, but Miss Barker had a cab called, 
 and succeeded in luring her into it. While she was engaged 
 in this process, Bertha Lowther, left alone with her daugh- 
 ter, stretched out her hands. 
 
 "Oh, David!" she said. "Oh, David!" 
 
 "It can't be helped, mother. It had to come. And a 
 crash is better than crumbling." 
 
 A faint smile illumined Bertha's face. "I spoke out 
 at last." 
 
 "At any rate," said Isabel Barker, coming back, "it 
 wasn't dull."
 
 CHAPTER XLV 
 
 OUTSIDE the Portman Rooms was an excited crowd, 
 consisting of medical students, prepared and eager 
 to support, with every weapon at their disposal, Professor 
 Betterton in his debate with Mrs. Home. They jeered at, 
 or cheered, as the fancy took them, every member of the 
 audience as those members passed into the building; they 
 were ripe for mischief for mischief's own sake ; they looked 
 forward to high jinks in the way of shouts, smells, and 
 other disturbing expedients. 
 
 Inside, in the hall, when David reached it twenty minutes 
 before the time fixed for the debate, most of the seats were 
 full, and in the atmosphere was that sense of expectation 
 and of contending influences, always present when a ques- 
 tion of keen interest and opposing issues is to be discussed. 
 She chose her place carefully, listening to scraps of con- 
 versation ere she seated herself in one of the few chairs 
 which were still vacant in the front part of the hall; for 
 she felt that she must be, as far as possible, in sympathetic 
 surroundings. She placed herself finally on the left side 
 of the hall, between the band-stand and the platform. 
 
 And sitting there, she saw Sidney Gale come in. He 
 was known to some of the students as a doctor; as such 
 was hailed as a member of the vivisectionist camp ; and was 
 greeted with shouts. David turned at the sound, and saw 
 him coming up the centre gangway, then turned away 
 again. She did not want him to see her there; in this 
 
 810
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 311 
 
 building they met as foes ; and a surface attitude of friend- 
 ship between her and Gale was impossible. 
 
 Gale had seen her almost the instant he entered the hall, 
 but seeing, looked away. He was not a man for half meas- 
 ures; having come to his decision, the next inevitable step 
 was to announce it openly, and he meant to show his colours 
 that night. After that, David would look upon him as an 
 enemy, and it was not worth while in the meantime to hold 
 her hand for an instant and exchange a few formal phrases. 
 He walked up to the front there was a seat kept for him 
 there and sat down near the platform. David, as the 
 people turned and twisted their heads, caught now and 
 again a glimpse of his tawny hair. 
 
 The hall had filled up, even to the doors, and now, with 
 a rush of hurrying feet, with snatches of songs and laugh- 
 ter, the students entered in a body. They ranged them- 
 selves behind David, on the band-stand and in a space 
 below it which had been allotted to them, and betook them- 
 selves forthwith to the manufacture of evil smells, a 
 substitute for argument which they employed many times 
 in the course of the evening. David, unused to the device, 
 gave them the satisfaction of turning round; but most of 
 the audience had been to meetings of the kind before, and 
 did not allow themselves to show any sign of disturbance. 
 
 Presently the students broke into shouts, derisive and 
 acclaiming; a stir went through all the hall, and loud 
 clapping broke out, as the chairman, the debaters, and their 
 supporters appeared on the platform. 
 
 David had never heard her friend speak in public, and 
 she sat with quickly beating heart while the chairman made 
 his introductory remarks and announced the rules of de- 
 bate. But when Judy, having waited till the applause and 
 groans which greeted her had died down, came to the front
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 of the platform and began to speak, David's nervousness 
 disappeared; and "I might have known," she said to her- 
 self, "that she would be able to do anything she undertook." 
 For Judy was entirely mistress of herself, her tongue, her 
 ideas, and her arguments. She did not once falter for a 
 word or confuse a strain of reasoning. When interrupted, 
 as she frequently was, by derisive shouts, hisses, and cries 
 of "No" from the students, she waited till she could make 
 herself heard, then went on calmly with the point she was 
 making or the argument she was engaged in. 
 
 She began by stating that vivisection was not a modern 
 innovation, peculiar to advanced science; that it had been 
 practised in pre-Christian eras, and had been practised not 
 only on animals but on human subjects, and that the only 
 novelty in connection with its practice to-day was the out- 
 cry against it; an outcry unheeded, despised, or condemned, 
 as are all initial protests, by the orthodox majority; raised 
 by men and women of advanced morality, to conquer in the 
 end, as truth always, in the end, conquers. 
 
 "No!" shouted the students, "No!" and side by side 
 with the shouts came a counterblast of applause. 
 
 "The signs are already there," said Judy. "I think we 
 can safely prophesy that the next fifty years will bring more 
 and more of the decline of what Pawlow calls the acute 
 experiment." 
 
 She went on to question the necessity of vivisection to 
 the advancement of science, basing her negative answer first 
 on what is known in Darwinian literature as "variation" 
 in animals ; that is to say, the extreme divergence in results 
 obtained by experiments on different animals ; and support- 
 ing her argument by quoting Professor Starling, Sir 
 Michael Foster, Huxley, and other known authorities; 
 secondly, on the fact that physiology, the science of normal
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 313 
 
 life, is studied, by means of vivisection, always under ab- 
 normal conditions. The fundamental fault of vivisection 
 as a scientific method, she declared, was the fact that it 
 forgets the unity of the organism ; the correlation of func- 
 tions, the mysterious and delicate harmony of the body as 
 a whole; and that it was only when physiology grew more 
 philosophical, when it entered again into contact with 
 what, for want of a better term, is called natural history, 
 that it could be raised to the rank of a more exact science 
 than it was at present. 
 
 The cries and counter-cries broke out again; the atmo- 
 sphere was charged with the forces of antagonistic feelings ; 
 David's nerves were strained to acute tension by the clash 
 and jangle of them. The antagonism deepened, the cries 
 were charged with jeers and laughter, when Judy spoke of 
 the relation between vivisection and medicine ; when she de- 
 clared that future progress lay in the direction of prevent- 
 ing disease by those hygienic and sanitary measures which 
 alone had rid Europe of the terrible scourges of the Middle 
 Ages; that the physician of the future would become more 
 and more a teacher of health, less and less a believer in the 
 efficacy of the drug and the knife; that the more rational 
 methods of healing by air, water, and electricity would 
 supersede the coarser medication of poisonous draughts and 
 injections ; and that diet, physical culture, and the general 
 rules of health would attract the attention of progressive 
 science. 
 
 The loud laughter of the students in no wise disconcerted 
 the speaker; the Irish blood in her rose always when she 
 was confronted with a fray; and she turned to her oppo- 
 nents with vigour. 
 
 "That may seem laughable," she said, "to those who 
 have never thought of the progress of medicine, to those
 
 314 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 who go through life in a narrow groove of accepted ideas 
 and prejudices and never trouble to step outside that 
 groove. But any one who takes the trouble to acquire a 
 wider mental outlook will see these tendencies, since they 
 are marked everywhere." 
 
 She went on to point out that the Royal Commission on 
 Tuberculosis sat on year after year, wasting time and 
 money, sacrificing animal life, producing no sure result 
 but pain. And then: "There is primarily no scientific or 
 medical aspect of this question," Judy said. "The question 
 is fundamentally a moral one. Throughout the evolution 
 of social morality there is one thing, one red thread, which 
 is very conspicuous; and it is that wherever mankind has 
 judged the rights and wrongs of a thing, there has been 
 what I may call the lower, immediate utility which has had 
 to be put aside for the greater, the higher, the further 
 utility; and that moral victories have always ultimately 
 been victories and triumphs on the physical, on the material 
 plane also." 
 
 She was obliged to pause here till the storm of inter- 
 ruption by the students, who opposed considerations of 
 mercy or morals with more vehemence than any others, had 
 been partly allayed by the chairman's intervention, had, 
 partly of itself, died away. 
 
 "Stealing," she went on, "is a practice which can be 
 defended from certain points of view. There are many poor 
 people in the streets who might like to rob some millionaires 
 who seem little to deserve their affluence and their pros- 
 perity. But society does not allow it. Society, though able 
 to see the smaller utility of feeding the hungry, of giving 
 bread to the child that has nothing to eat, of bringing joy 
 and happiness to the home that is sunk in misery ; society, 
 though it may see these things, forbids stealing, because it
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 315 
 
 sees the further, the greater, the wider morality, and knows" 
 that that wider morality will ultimately lead to greater 
 physical benefit, to greater physical harmony in the great 
 social unit. In the same way I maintain that vivisectional 
 utility is the lesser, the smaller, the seemingly necessary 
 one which, if discarded, will ultimately bring about greater 
 moral and social health, and thereby also greater physical 
 health. For if the ultimate aim is to reach a state where 
 mankind is governed by the inner and cultivated instincts 
 of doing to others only what you would like to have done 
 to yourselves, then vivisection is doomed to extinction, and 
 the result will be the production of a humanity which is 
 morally whole and intellectually sane."
 
 CHAPTER XLVI 
 
 AS Judy sat down, applause, jeers, shouts, hisses, broke 
 forth in opposing tumult; and through the tumult, 
 informing, intensifying it, swept the conflicting passions 
 which, springing from the hearts of the audience, held and 
 swayed it. David, tossed on the tide of battling emotions, 
 clapped with hands that trembled. Judy was her friend; 
 her love for her in those minutes was charged with pride ; 
 while her zeal for the cause she pleaded was rendered 
 intenser and at the same time less pure by the narrower 
 spirit of the partisan. 
 
 Turning, she saw the students, derisive, antagonistic, yet, 
 as was borne in upon her even in the confused consciousness 
 of the moment, inspired, not by convictions but by tradi- 
 tions; lads hot with loyalty to their leaders; boys for 
 most of them were hardly more loving a row for its own 
 sake. Surely if tradition had handed them a different creed, 
 they would have held it with- equal fervour ! 
 
 The noise they delighted in broke forth anew when Pro- 
 fessor Betterton rose ; in the form now of hurrahs, of cheers, 
 of the singing of "For he's a jolly good fellow." So great, 
 indeed, was their enthusiasm, that it considerably interfered 
 with their leader's opening sentences. 
 
 The professor could hardly be said to reply to Judy's 
 speech, since he took up a different ground from hers. For 
 him, in the question, there was no moral issue, such an issue 
 being, as he implied, dependent on certain conditions, the 
 
 816
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 317 
 
 existence of which he refused to admit. He made some 
 personal remarks on Judy, reflecting on her capacity for 
 opposing him. He allowed that experiments belonging to 
 an earlier period, and which were no longer performed, had 
 been cruel, but asserted that the vivisection of the present 
 was painless. He declared that anti-vivisection was a lost 
 cause. 
 
 He argued that because doctors as a body are not cruel, 
 physiologists cannot be cruel either; but later on he ap- 
 peared to adopt as his definition of cruelty that given in an 
 Act of Parliament which lays down that "The mere in- 
 fliction of pain, even of extreme pain, is not sufficient to 
 constitute cruelty." 
 
 Hd based his defence of vivisection entirely on expedi- 
 ency, and supported the utilitarian argument by references 
 to the diminution of rinderpest and by an appeal to the 
 fears and the selfish instincts of his hearers. "What will 
 happen when your child is dying of diphtheria, with the 
 membrane slowly encroaching? Will you not then take 
 the benefits that have been derived from experimentation ? 
 Will you let your children die for the sake of a rabbit?" 
 
 The students cheered vociferously, and" David, listening, 
 recalled the days when words such as these would have 
 caused her to join in the cheers. But now she longed to 
 cry out: "And what if I save my child from starvation by 
 robbing or prostitution or any of the ways that society 
 recognises as wrong? Is there morality, or is there not? or 
 is self-interest the only test of right?" As for the rhetorical 
 rabbit, the picturesque limitation had no power to affect her 
 imagination-; she knew well that the true name of that one 
 rabbit was legion. 
 
 The professor adduced statistics from the Metropolitan 
 Asylums Board Hospitals to prove that the case mortality
 
 318 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 from diphtheria had decreased since the introduction ol 
 anti-toxin. He did not mention that the actual mortality 
 had increased, that the tendency of the disease was to 
 spread, to claim ever more victims ; nor did he state that the 
 report of the Metropolitan Asylums Board showed that of 
 the cases on which the statistics of case mortality were 
 based, nine hundred and eight had been in one year falsely 
 diagnosed as diphtheria. 1 
 
 He brought forward a further argument with which 
 David was well acquainted, and which, even when she 
 shared the views of the man to whom she now listened, had 
 always struck her as fallacious; the argument that, since 
 other cruel practices were rife in the world, vivisection, 
 even though cruel, was justified. 
 
 The professor concluded by stating that Judy was im- 
 perfectly equipped for the discussion of the subject under 
 debate, and the assertion that vivisection was as necessary to 
 physiological discovery as is any one part of the machinery 
 of a watch to the working of the whole. 
 
 All through, the students had supported and interrupted 
 him by cheers and comments ; now they gave vent to a pro- 
 longed burst of cheering and the repetition of their favour- 
 ite song; and again the battle of warring forces which was 
 waged all that evening in the emotional consciousness of 
 the audience swelled to fiercest contest. When the physical 
 sound of it was stilled, the chairman announced that the 
 meeting was open to general discussion, and that six per- 
 sons desirous of speaking had sent up their names. 
 
 David knew who one of them was ; she had seen Gale rise 
 from his seat and hand a slip of paper to the chairman. It 
 was natural, of course, that he should speak in support of 
 his friend. He and Professor Betterton were acquainted, 
 
 App, 84.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 819 
 
 she knew; and even if they were no more than acquaint- 
 ances, it was to be expected that Gale would uphold his 
 profession. But oh ! how she wished he would not speak ! 
 Not that it made any difference; it would be no worse to 
 hear him state his views than to know, as she knew already, 
 that he held them ; but nevertheless she shrank from hear- 
 ing him utter them publicly. As each speaker left the 
 platform she dreaded to hear in the next name called the 
 name- she knew ; but it was not till the other five debaters 
 had spoken that the chairman said, " Dr. Gale." 
 
 She saw Gale rise and mount the platform; she saw 
 Professor Betterton smile at him; she saw him turn his 
 eyes towards the place where she sat, and knew that they 
 rested on her and that he recognised her. He supposed, no 
 doubt, that she was in sympathy with him. If he could 
 only have known how she shrank from what he was about 
 to say! 
 
 Gale, on his part, was aided by a sense of desperation. 
 He had come, knowing that there would be present many 
 men with whom he was acquainted; knowing that, were 
 that by chance not the case, the fact that he spoke on Bet- 
 terton's platform against Betterton's cause was quite suffi- 
 cient to advertise his change of attitude throughout the 
 profession. He was prepared to "face the music," and he 
 shrank hardly at all from doing it. The shrinking had 
 been done out in the wilderness. 
 
 But David ! She would have known, to be sure, in any 
 case, very soon ; but he would rather not have had her eyes 
 upon him as he spoke, and feel that those eyes would lose 
 their friendliness as she listened. And her anxious face, as 
 he saw it there, distinct amidst the sea, of faces, touched 
 him, tempted him, all the more because of the trouble in it ; 
 calling out that longing to protect, to help her, which had
 
 320 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 been a dominant desire in him all through the years of 
 crushed passion and banished hope. And now he was about 
 to cut himself off from any chance of losing that longing 
 in the attainment of its end; to cut himself off by un- 
 less 
 
 For a moment he was caught up, swept from the plat- 
 form, set on a great height, saw the kingdom of love and 
 the glory of it ; just while the students, recognising, as they 
 thought, an advocate, struck up, "For he's a jolly good 
 fellow." Then, as they paused, he began to speak. 
 
 "Don't sing, gentlemen, till I have said my say. Mr. 
 Chairman, ladies, and gentlemen ! I've come up here to 
 say that from the time I was a medical student, the ques- 
 tion of vivisection has been an insistent one with me. I 
 didn't want to think about it, but I couldn't help myself; 
 I had to think, I had to go into it. I think I may say that 
 it's a question I've looked at from every point of view 
 the utilitarian, the humanitarian, the moral, the scien- 
 tific. In my practice I've applied the principles laid down 
 by vivisectional research; or tried to apply them. For" 
 Gale gave the little gesture that David knew, and his hair 
 rebelled in the old way "for, over and over again, my 
 clinical experience has opposed my vivisectional teaching, 
 and times and again in cancer cases especially I've 
 found that teaching not only ineffective, but misleading." 
 
 A great shout went up ; the air was rent with the volume 
 of it. Gale waited a minute while the sound surged round 
 him; then his voice struggled with the hooting and the 
 groans, the cat-calls and the hisses which greeted him from 
 the students' stronghold; with the cheers and clapping that 
 sprang up from all parts of the hall ; struggled, and in the 
 end for it was as strong in its way as his hair conquered. 
 "I haven't much more to say ; you may as well hear it. For
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 321 
 
 that reason and others others that have been ably stated 
 by Mrs. Home to-night I need not repeat them I take 
 my stand with the party she represents ; and, standing in its 
 midst, I believe I stand with that section of thinkers and 
 actors whose saner and wider outlook will, in the long run, 
 sweep the present system into the limbo of mistakes." 
 
 Of the confusion that followed Gale's words David was 
 but half aware ; she did not hear the debaters' replies ; she 
 did not know that a resolution on the question debated was 
 taken, and that the anti-vivisectionists carried the day. She 
 sat quite still, till the crowd about her had partially ebbed 
 away ; her strong desire was to see Gale, and to tell him of 
 her relief and sympathy. 
 
 But Gale, seeing her rigid attitude, her pale, moved face, 
 had drawn his own conclusions from her bearing, and had 
 gone away without coming near her. 
 
 By and by David rose and joined Judy, who was waiting 
 for her as had been arranged, and the two women left the 
 hall together. But it was Judy who talked, all the way in 
 the cab, of the evening's last episode. David spoke little, 
 and not at all of Gale. 1 
 
 *App. 35.
 
 CHAPTER XLVII 
 
 DAVID did not sleep much that night. The currents 
 of feeling which had swept through the meeting 
 seemed still about her : still she was moved by the passion 
 of desire to win victory for her cause; still she faced the 
 storm of angry derision which had greeted Gale's announce- 
 ment. She felt that storm, indeed, more fully in the quiet 
 of her home than in the minutes of its raging; for now 
 she could realise the impression then made, and obscured 
 at the moment by a haze of profound emotion. 
 
 Gale had met the storm calmly ; he had not left the plat- 
 form till it had subsided, but had stood, smoothing down 
 his air, and looking straight at the howling students with 
 those queer, keen eyes of his. And this central figure of 
 the picture had, for David, filled the canvas, and she had 
 been conscious of but one sensation gladness. The shock 
 of surprise caused by the first words of Gale's recantation 
 had been followed by a rush of excitement; and then had 
 come the gladness, and had held her ever since; held her 
 now, as she moved about her room, doing the things she 
 did every night 
 
 Lying down in bed, with eyes closed for sleep, the eve- 
 ning repeated itself in simultaneous presentments of all 
 that had taken place; vivid, graphic, entirely destructive 
 of the possibility of rest. David fought with the visions 
 for a time, then left her bed and seated herself in an arm-
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 323 
 
 chair by the open window. From that window she could 
 look into Connaught Square, could see a clear space of 
 starry sky, and, in the faint starlight, motionless trees. 
 
 It was a warm night, and the still air was soft and 
 soothing; every now and again a cab turned the corner of 
 the Square and rattled past; and the hum of traffic came 
 up from the Edgware Road. Gradually David's spirit was 
 released from the Portman Booms; gradually her limbs 
 relaxed, till she lay back with her head resting on the 
 cushion of the chair; gradually she fell asleep. 
 
 When she awoke it was light, with a pale morning light, 
 gilded with faint sunshine. She awoke with a little shiver, 
 for it was chilly now ; a little sense of bewilderment at find- 
 ing herself in an unwonted position, an unwonted place; 
 and the usual little pause of shrinking memory, before she 
 took up again the burden of knowledge which had been 
 hers since the iron of realisation had entered into her soul. 
 All her life David kept her buoyancy of temperament ; but, 
 like all those who have once heard the cry of pain, from 
 whatever part of the vast kingdom of being that cry may 
 come, she could never again forget it. 
 
 There axe some who, hearing the cry with the outward 
 ears only, weep for a night and find joy again in the morn- 
 ing. There are some who, hearing thus, shrink from the 
 sound and stop their ears, declaring they cannot bear it ; 
 and these are the sentimentalists, who think more of their 
 own pain than the relief of the suffering. And there are 
 some who, hearing in this outer way, care not at all. But 
 those who have heard truly, with the inner ear, never forget 
 the cry; its sound is in their souls; its appeal is continual. 
 These know that it can never cease till all men listen, all 
 men have heard, and all men unite to still it; and these
 
 324 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 work unflaggingly, finding greater rest in work than in 
 inaction. 
 
 The cry was with David now as constantly as the memory 
 of her lost child ; not always dominating her consciousness, 
 but swaying her heart ; and it was there this morning, com- 
 pelling, insistent, hut with, as it seemed to her, a new trem- 
 bling note in it, the faint promise of a far-off deliverance. 
 Up till now she had lived in a land of hostility, a land 
 where all her fellow-countrymen, save only her mother and 
 Judy, were set in a solid phalanx of opinion which 'she, 
 singly, must defy; and defying it, she had felt as though 
 she beat the air. But last night she had met, as it were, an 
 allied army, pledged to the cause which was her own ; had 
 felt the support of companionship; realised the vitality in 
 a movement which she had been accustomed to hear branded 
 as futile. A lost cause? Nay, a dawning power, destined 
 to become dominant; despised and rejected of the mighty 
 amongst men, yet compassed about with a cloud of witness 
 in the prophecies of seers, the songs of poets, the service of 
 the pitiful. 
 
 And now, amongst those servants stood Sidney Gale, 
 whose friendship she need not refuse, whose love for 
 David was frank with herself she was free to accept. 
 
 It was the thought of that love, of which she could not 
 be confident, that caused her to hesitate about writing to 
 Gale. So long as there had been a barrier between them, 
 she had felt sure that he loved her : now that the barrier 
 was broken down, she began to doubt. He had left the hall 
 last night without speaking to her. Surely if he cared at 
 
 all and knowing now that they thought alike But 
 
 did he know it? How indeed, when she came to think of 
 it, should he know it ? It was possible, more than possible, 
 more, even, than probable, that he knew no more of her
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 325 
 
 change of attitude than she had known of his. And if he 
 
 didn't ? 
 
 In the end she wrote : 
 
 "DEAR DR. GALE, 
 
 "I thought when you went on to the platform last 
 night that you were going to speak on the other side, and 
 I, like you, have left that side, and come over to the 
 minority. To find a friend where one looked for a foe is 
 a rare pleasure, and I feel myself obliged to congratulate 
 both you and myself. 
 
 "Yours sincerely, 
 
 "DAVID CRANLEY-CHANCE." 
 
 i 
 
 When she had written and sent the letter, she was seized 
 with panic, and went out. Supposing he were to come? 
 
 Gale did come, but not, as it happened, till she had 
 returned. 
 
 He had arrived home on the preceding night in that 
 state of exaltation which often carries a man triumphantly, 
 nay joyfully, through an act of abnegation; for the wine 
 of sacrifice has an intoxication of its own. But the morn- 
 ing, according to the undeviating law of sequence, brought 
 with it reaction, and Gale left home to go through his daily 
 round in a depression unrelieved by any consciousness of 
 heroism. He had thrown everything away, and yet had felt 
 at the time that much remained ; a magnificent much ; but 
 this morning it seemed that there was nothing left. When, 
 therefore, coming in to a delayed lunch, he found David's 
 note on the hall table, he expected to find in it the disdain- 
 ful reproach which he fancied he had read upon her face. 
 
 What he actually found, reward instead of punishment, 
 sympathy and not disdain, seemed, in the first great revul-
 
 326 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 sion of feeling, impossible to believe. It could not be, was 
 his first thought ; the desire of his heart distorted his sight 
 and gave a false sense to words which would presently 
 reveal themselves as messages of cold reproach. He had 
 said good-bye to love ; and here was love, radiant, bidding 
 him good-morrow ! It could not be. 
 
 Yet there stood joy's credentials, plainly written, in the 
 handwriting that he knew ; the words did not change as he 
 read them again and again. This marvel was a verity after 
 all. He had thrown away his mess of pottage ; but he had 
 found was it not his birthright? the right to win the 
 love of the woman who had been for him always the one 
 woman, apart from and above all others in the world. 
 
 He would answer the letter at once. No, he would go to 
 Connaught Street. He had been as anxious hitherto to 
 avoid David as David to avoid him ; but there was no need 
 to avoid har any more. 
 
 He did not reach Connaught Street till late, for he was 
 a bus} r man now, and consultation after consultation filled 
 his afternoon. It was after half-past six when David heard 
 his knock, and knew that it was his. 
 
 "I am very late," said Gale. "I meant to come before." 
 "It is good of you to come, busy as you are." 
 "I wanted to answer your note by word of mouth." 
 "I am very glad to see you." David, who had been, 
 filled, when she heard Gale's knock, with delightful expec- 
 tation, found herself sinking into the feeblest commonplace. 
 But Gale, who had come with the full intention of being 
 commonplace, was lifted out of himself by the sight of her 
 face, the fact of her presence. 
 
 "I should have come long ago," he said, "but that I
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 327 
 
 imagined we belonged to opposite camps, and I supposed 
 you would not have anything to do with me." 
 
 Then, suddenly, he said the words that he had thought 
 he might perhaps say in a month's time. "I've cared for 
 you always, David. Is there any hope for me?" 
 
 Now that the words were said, it seemed fitting, in the 
 natural order of things, to David, as well as to Gale, that 
 they should be uttered then and there, before the discussion 
 of aught else. 
 
 David did not speak, because her lips were tremulous; 
 but her gaze sought Gale's, and he, meeting it, read his 
 answer in her eyes. 
 
 "But you must realise," Gale said later, "that you are 
 marrying a sort of pariah. And goodness only knows what 
 will become of my practice." 
 
 "And you must realise that you are marrying a sort of 
 pauper. All that Cranley left me goes to a cousin if I 
 marry again. I have only my aunt's legacy and the settle- 
 ment money. It comes to under two hundred and fifty a 
 year altogether." 
 
 "Thank the Lord!" said Gale, "that they can't say I'm 
 marrying you for your money. All the same, two hundred 
 and fifty a year seems to me uncomfortably much." 
 
 "They'll probably say that you're marrying me because 
 nobody but an anti-vivisectionist would have you," David 
 assured him. 
 
 He stayed with her all the evening. She gave him a little 
 impromptu dinner, in the recess in the dining-room where 
 the stained window was. David always dined in that recess, 
 at a tiny table, except when she had company ; and Gale 
 delightful thought! was no longer company. He thought 
 the dinner perfect. Every dish was excellent. (The pud-
 
 328 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 ding was a trifle burnt, but Gale took two helpings.) What 
 a clever housekeeper David must be! 
 
 David's housewifely feeling was strong enough to draw 
 the line of approval at burnt pudding; nevertheless she 
 omitted the next morning to remonstrate with the cook. 
 
 They were supremely happy, these two people, who stood 
 on the edge of storms and thought they had reached a last- 
 ing haven ; who had touched hands, as it were, as boy and 
 girl, and now, as man and woman, might let those hands 
 meet in an abiding clasp. To Gale, that evening, came back 
 much of the boyish gladness of bis youth; but David rested 
 in her woman's happiness. It was the sweeter possession.
 
 THE marriage of David and Gale and their joint heresy 
 made a nine days' wonder in that corner of the world 
 to which they both belonged; and a variety of scandalous 
 tales kept that corner actively employed in speech and hear- 
 ing for many weeks. 
 
 It was said that Gale had always been a secret foe to his 
 own household, that he had Jesuitical tendencies and had 
 only spoken out by reason of pressure applied from high 
 quarters; that he had made love to and perverted David 
 during her husband's lifetime; and that Cranley-Chance 
 had been spared much sorrow and scandal by his untimely 
 end. For all this Gale cared little, and David not much; 
 the only serious trouble that David suffered was on her 
 father's account. 
 
 Lowther's prejudices were outraged, his pride wounded 
 to the quick, by his daughter's attitude and conduct. They 
 constituted what he felt to be a personal disgrace, and his 
 affection for David was turned into a bitterness which for- 
 bade all intercourse with her. Lady Lowther, the desire of 
 whose heart found fulfilment in David's marriage, was 
 robbed of half fulfilment's sweetness by Lowther's for- 
 bidding his daughter the house. She could go to see David, 
 but David might not come to see her; and she went to the 
 wedding in surreptitious splendour, making a compromise 
 with her husband's known wishes by dispensing with the 
 carriage and conveying herself and a new lilac silk dress to 
 
 829
 
 330 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 the church in a cab. She had the unique experience of 
 being the most gorgeously attired person present; for 
 David, deeply and sharply grieved by the breach with her 
 father, had arranged that the wedding should be, in every 
 respect, as little conspicuous as possible ; and Gale did not 
 care in what fashion he was married, provided, as he said in 
 answer to David's suggestions, the ceremony was legal. 
 
 Percy Burdon was in the church, faithful but disap- 
 proving. He had come up to London some weeks before, 
 when he first heard of the engagement, and had talked, as 
 he told Polly afterwards, very seriously to his cousin. Gale 
 still attracted him, and seemed indeed very little different 
 from what he had always been ; but it was the attraction of 
 forbidden fruit; Percy felt there was an heretical flavour 
 in the apple of Gale's companionship. His counsels to 
 David were those of filial duty combined with prudence. 
 
 "Uncle Bernard feels it terribly, you know, and I don't 
 wonder. He's getting an old man now, too. Besides, ten 
 to one, he doesn't leave you a halfpenny." 
 
 "I'm sorry. I wish I could make him younger. As for 
 the halfpenny, I can't help it. Let's hope you'll benefit by 
 my destitution." 
 
 " For shame, David ! As if I thought I'm speaking 
 
 for your good; I'm so afraid you haven't thought it over." 
 
 "I have, I assure you. Will it relieve your mind if I 
 tell you that I lie awake at night, thinking it over ?" 
 
 "You do?" Percy looked doubtful. 
 
 "I do indeed. And the more I think, the happier I am." 
 
 "Oh, David! But it's so rash, you know. Supposing he 
 loses his practice? A consulting practice like his, you 
 know. Are you quite sure you're not making a mistake?" 
 
 "I would so much rather risk making a mistake," said
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 331 
 
 David, "than be quite sure I was wrong." And that was 
 all Percy had to take back with him to Langborough. 
 
 He returned for the wedding, alone; the presence of 
 Polly might have appeared to countenance the disloyal 
 eccentricity of the two people whom he could not dislodge 
 from his heart, and he felt that he gave the right touch 
 by appearing in solitary benevolence. 
 
 The only other persons in the church were Gale's half 
 brother, who acted as best man, Judy, and a woman with 
 a disfigured face, the erstwhile Sarah Jennings, resplendent 
 in a large hat with red feathers. 
 
 Lady Lowther, sitting beside Judy in a front pew, 
 thought of that other wedding day of David's when she 
 had caught sight of Gale's miserable face in the gallery, 
 and, for all her husband's wrath, rejoiced. To Gale too 
 the memory came, placed itself side by side with the present 
 and made that present ineffable. And to David it presented 
 itself, but was by her refused admittance, since to her it 
 brought a train of other memories, too sad or too terrible 
 to face. 
 
 Three years after her second marriage, David was sent 
 for by her father. He had never spoken to her since the 
 dreadful day on which he had forbidden her his house, con- 
 firmed in his anger against her, his dislike of Gale, by the 
 fact that they both took an active part in the movement 
 which he hated. Had they chosen a neutral way, his dis- 
 pleasure might have dwindled to contempt; but Gale was 
 not the man, nor David the woman, to be content with 
 neutrality. "And besides," said Gale, "we may as well be 
 hung for a sheep as a lamb." 
 
 David's sheep consisted in taking over a considerable 
 portion of the work which had been done by Judy; for 
 Judy, soon after David's marriage, found herself obliged
 
 332 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 to loosen her hold upon some of the reins which she had 
 held so firmly until now; and it seemed to David that the 
 chance of semi-reconciliation with her father was not a 
 sufficient ground for refusing to do definite work. 
 
 But now Lowther was dying, and desired to see his 
 daughter before he died. 
 
 David came tremblingly. Her love for him had outlived 
 his bitterness; her girlish admiration still persisted; his 
 refusal to see her or her children had been a perpetual cloud 
 on the happiness she found with Gale. She brought the 
 children with her now ; a boy and a girl ; the girl a baby but 
 a few months old. But Lowther, having glanced at the 
 children, motioned them away. 
 
 "I can't do with babies," he said; "and that boy" he 
 glanced at the little fellow clinging to David's skirt "is 
 too like his father. You don't suppose I'm going to for- 
 give Gale?" 
 
 "I don't suppose anything. I'm only glad to see you 
 again." 
 
 "Dying. I haven't left you anything, David." 
 
 David's face flushed at the proof of his persistent enmity. 
 
 "Do you think I'm going to have Gale battening on my 
 money?" Lowther's lip went out in the old way. "Pooh !" 
 
 "We don't want your money, father." 
 
 "Don't you? I should have thought you did. Gale's 
 practice is going down hill as fast as I could wish, I 
 hear." 
 
 "Father, why did you send for me if this is all you have 
 to say?" 
 
 "Because I had a fancy to see you again. I shall have 
 another attack soon. / know. It's no good these other 
 fellows coming and rubbing their hands over me; I know
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 333 
 
 tte tricks of the trade. And then I shan't be able to see 
 anything or anybody." 
 
 The wounded feeling and the anger which had sprung 
 from it melted out of David's heart. She was his only 
 child, he had been proud of her, and she had disappointed 
 him. She knelt down beside him. 
 
 "I'm so sorry, so very sorry." 
 
 The falter in her voice touched him ; or his brain, clear at 
 times, became clouded. He looked at her with softer eyes. 
 
 "I always liked your face, Girlie," he said. It was a 
 name he had not used since her childhood; perhaps he for- 
 got how deeply she had offended him. "It was never a 
 tiresome face; and you were never a tiresome woman." The 
 cloud deepened on his brain, lifted from his heart. "I was 
 very proud of you before you married. He's a good deal 
 older of course, and you were very young. As if I didn't 
 know you were young ! I knew your age as well as she did. 
 But your mother was always a fool. . . . But a good posi- 
 tion he's made his name. With a position like that and 
 your brains and your face, you might be a leader a leader 
 of society." 
 
 It was evident that he had forgotten Cranley-Chance's 
 death, forgotten what had come just before it, forgotten 
 what had happened since. By the time he remembered, by 
 the time his mind came back to him, and, with his mind, 
 his bitterness, David had gone ; and he did not send for her 
 again. 
 
 It was not long before his prediction was fulfilled; he 
 had diagnosed his own case with accuracy; and a month 
 after David's visit the neswpapers gave a column to the 
 " Death of Sir Bernard Lowther." 
 
 Lowther was extolled as a great man, one who had 
 benefited humanity and advanced science. "Hia range of
 
 334 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 subjects," said the Morning Messenger, "was limited to 
 those branches of science and medicine of which he had 
 made himself master, but his outlook was wide. He put 
 progress before prejudice, and knowledge before sentiment. 
 The work that such men do is of incalculable benefit ; their 
 lives are lives of self-sacrifice." 
 
 Later on, under "Wills and Bequests" appeared an ac- 
 count of the way in which Lowther had bequeathed his 
 money. His words to David had been no empty threat ; he 
 had left her not a farthing ; nor her children, because they 
 were also Gale's. Lady Lowther was provided for by a life 
 interest in fifteen thousand pounds. Percy received ten 
 thousand; Edgar Hall another ten "to aid him in his 
 beneficent work" ; and the remainder of the sixty thousand 
 which Lowther had made and saved went to the Medical 
 School of the hospital on the staff of which he had been for 
 so many years. 
 
 David had spoken truly when she told her father she did 
 not want his money ; she had no thought of currying favour 
 with him when, in answer to his message, she had come to 
 Harley Street; nevertheless, when the contents of the will 
 were made known, she could not entirely suppress a sense 
 of disappointment. The absence of her name was a public 
 repudiation of her ; she felt that, in spite of that last inter- 
 view, Lowther had not really forgiven her; and then, in 
 the Gale household, money was far from plentiful. 
 
 Lowther's jibe had the sting of truth in it; his son-in- 
 law's practice was undoubtedly declining. His diagnosis 
 was as acute and accurate as ever, his treatment as intelli- 
 gent, his skill as great; but he was no longer invited to 
 consultations. It became necessary for David to do what in 
 all her life she had never done, to be careful in the spending 
 of shillings, to deny herself the little indulgences, the small
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 335 
 
 extravagances which she had eajoyed without thinking 
 about them. Gale knocked off the whole of his wine mer- 
 chant's bill (a bill chiefly incurred on behalf of his friends) 
 and half his tailor's; and at the time of David's visit to her 
 father it was a serious question between the husband and 
 wife whether they should give up the brougham. 
 
 "Not that I mind walking now I've got the time," said 
 Gale; "but it's a confession of failure and may lead to 
 bankruptcy in patients." 
 
 "We'll keep it on, and save in other ways." 
 
 "The puzzle is to find the ways." 
 
 "Oh, we could do with a servant less; and my dress- 
 maker is absurdly extravagant." 
 
 "You haven't had a new dress at all this summer, sweet- 
 heart. Do you think I don't notice?" 
 
 "What I wear?" 
 
 "Yes, what you wear and what you do everything." 
 
 "I consider," said David, surveying herself in the glass, 
 "that I look very nice. Besides, losing all your patients 
 won't conduce to reckless expenditure in the matter of 
 clothes." 
 
 "There's the children's education to think of." 
 
 "Oh, don't let's think of educating them yet, Sidney, 
 poor little mites." 
 
 "No, but it's got to come. I used not to care a hang 
 about what was going to happen and all that. But now, 
 by Jove ! " 
 
 "We'll keep the carriage for a bit, at any rate. Let's 
 make a good fight of it, Sidney. And don't, for heaven's 
 sake, make me feel that you would have got on better with- 
 out me and the children." 
 
 "All right. We'll keep it on, make a hollow show and 
 blow the expense ! And here's to the health of David Gale
 
 336 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 and all the little Gales !" Sidney drank up his tea, kissed 
 David, and made for the door. "There's a poor benighted 
 patient, who don't know I am an A.-V., coming at five- 
 thirty," he said. "Lef s hope he won't find it out till he's 
 cured." 
 
 "Is he curable?" 
 
 "Eather. Lord! I could cure him and dozens like him 
 if they'd only listen or hearing, understand. But people 
 won't stop taking what's bad for them. What they want is 
 to stuff themselves with poisons and then be given an anti- 
 dote. Patch them up and they love and pay you. Try 
 to cure and they go and pay somebody else." 
 
 When Gale had gone David went and stood before the 
 mirror, a long narrow one that hung between the two win- 
 dows and showed her the greater part of herself. Her gaze 
 was critical, but it relaxed in satisfaction. "So long as I 
 don't look dirty or dowdy, what does it matter ?" she said.
 
 CHAPTER XLIX 
 
 THOUGH Lowther had bequeathed his daughter noth- 
 ing, indirectly she benefited by the money he left, for 
 Bertha contrived to spend a large proportion of her five 
 hundred a year on the Gale household. 
 
 "I could not stay on in Harley Street, even if I wanted 
 to,"' she said, "and I am tired of those great roomst I 
 should like the smallest house I can find." 
 
 So she established herself in one of the tiny houses in 
 Portsea Place, with a former housemaid, now widowed, who 
 was willing, on condition of being called her housekeeper, 
 to undertake the functions of a "general"; and every day 
 Lady Lowther, usually with the aid of a friendly policeman, 
 crossed the Edgware Road and lunched in Montagu Street. 
 For this "partial board," as she termed it, she insisted upon 
 paying a guinea a week; insisted, too, upon buying all her 
 grandchildren's clothes and on making frequent presents to 
 their mother. Bertha always found an excuse for her gifts ; 
 it was Christmas or New Year's Day, Easter, Midsummer 
 or Michaelmas; or somebody's birthday; and David, after 
 the first demur at the new order of things, accepted the 
 gifts as freely as they were given, realising that in prac- 
 tising petty economies and helping her and Gale, her 
 mother was happier than she had been during the greater 
 part of her life. 
 
 The help eased them in the struggle to maintain that out- 
 
 887
 
 338 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 ward token of prosperity, the carriage; and though Gale's 
 professional visits grew fewer, he still paid them in state. 
 
 As for Bertha, having reached the stage of realising that 
 she was free, she immensely enjoyed her freedom. It 
 seeaned strange at first to be able to do as she liked, and 
 then less strange than delightful. She dropped away from 
 most of her old acquaintances; an easy thing to do when 
 the dropping process was a mutual one ; but she made new 
 friends, and went to meetings with David, and heard David 
 speak, her heart almost bursting with pride the while ; and 
 stood, indeed, upon a summit of content. 
 
 David, taking a part in propaganda, working actively for 
 the cause she had taken up, met with divers disillusion- 
 ments. She had thrown herself into that cause with the 
 fervent enthusiasm of a whole-hearted nature, and with all 
 the confidence of those who fight for truth with truth's 
 pure weapons. She found enthusiasm indeed ; but a fervour 
 not always discriminating; weapons marred often with the 
 mire of misstatement. She learned what so many have had 
 to learn before her, that movements inspired by truth are 
 constantly greater than their makers, while the causes 
 which depend for their vitality on the men who lead or 
 follow them are often weak or worthless. But David, when 
 she started her campaign, did not know this; and it was 
 pain and grief to her to meet, amidst the nobility of pur- 
 pose, the courage^ keen intellect and self-sacrifice of many 
 of her fellow-workers, with the exaggerations, the calum- 
 nies, and the unbalanced bigotry which are worse foes to 
 any principle than its direct enemies. Often, when facing 
 a platform, she was filled with shame by the unfair and 
 inaccurate statements which were hurled from its boards, 
 by the perversion of facts or the exaggeration of wrongs*; 
 and she longed to substitute the clean cut of truth for the
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 339 
 
 ^ 
 
 jagged- wounds more damaging to supporters than oppo- 
 nents. 
 
 Having lived all her life amongst those who were now 
 opponents, she knew well that in their ranks were many 
 men humane in thought and noble in intention ; many who, 
 approving of the system of vivisection, found themselves 
 unable to practise it; many who, actually practising it, 
 shrank from conscious- cruelty. She knew, too, that there 
 were experiments involving no positive pain, either at the 
 time of experiment or after, to the animal operated upon ; 
 that there was much classed under the head of scientific 
 vivisection which was infinitely less cruel than many of the 
 barba-rities of the farmyard, the slaughter-house, or the fur 
 and feather trades. 
 
 Knowing all this, shamed and indignant at the denial of 
 it, she was doubly careful, when she herself stood upon the 
 platform, to be just to the enemies of her cause, and so just 
 to the cause itself. That cause needed, she knew, no aid 
 from exaggeration or falsehood; the inherent justice of it 
 was sufficient to bear it through the ridicule, contempt, 
 active antagonism, and paralysing indifference which have 
 met all movements springing from a conception of morality 
 nobler than the standard of their time; was sufficient to 
 vitalise and support it till the majority of the advancing 
 community could recognise and accept its truth. There 
 was no need to state that all experiments were painful, since 
 by and by men would agree that a system founded on the 
 rights of might must be a system which could recognise no 
 dividing line between use and abuse; since later still it 
 would be conceded that the selfish use of weaker beings, 
 human or sub-human, is in itself an abuse; till finally it 
 would be seen that man, raciallv, gains more by cultivating 
 courage than acquiring ease, by developing love than
 
 340 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 amassing knowledge. Then, as Cameron maintained, when 
 the selfish ways were closed, new avenues would be opened : 
 to knowledge, to health, to the understanding by man of 
 man's true origin, nature, and fate. Men, turning from 
 the blind alleys of disease commissions, would perceive that 
 the one cure for disease is health, not the substitution for it 
 of attenuated maladies ; and that health is won, not in spite 
 of that nature of which man forms a part, but by a more 
 subtle study of the laws of being than is possible by vivi- 
 sectional methods. 
 
 David, speaking, insisted always upon the big issues, on 
 ultimate as well as on immediate results ; and her instances 
 of cruelty or failure on the part of her opponents were 
 instances which rested on first-hand testimony. "What is 
 the use of exaggeration," she would ask, "when the truth is 
 more than sufficiently terrible?" 
 
 Gale, meanwhile, had come to the conclusion that the 
 carriage must go. His practice, robbed of the consulting 
 element, was small, and did not increase. People had be- 
 come imbued with the idea that he was not "up to date"; 
 and though most of his old patients remained to him, their 
 ranks were not swelled by new ones. Having decided that 
 it would be absurd to keep on the carriage, he had to tell 
 David of his decision. He did it on a day of biting east 
 wind, when David, coming in, had sought warmth in his 
 study. There was not often a fire in the drawing-room 
 now. 
 
 When he had said his say, she held out a foot to the 
 flames. " Certainly, if your 'carriage practice' has all gone, 
 there's no use in having a carriage. We'll just descend, 
 gracefully, to a lower sphere." 
 
 Gale caught her in his arms; his heart was miserable
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 341 
 
 with the thought that he had dragged her down from wealth 
 to share his sordid fate. 
 
 She knew the thought; felt it, perhaps, in the clasp of 
 the arms about her ; and answered it in French words that 
 were favourites with her; leaning back from him, so that 
 she could look into his eyes. 
 
 "Quand meme," she said. 
 
 The next night the two went to the play. "Because," 
 said David, "we shall be so much richer now without that 
 .horrid carriage gnawing at our vitals; and because it's so 
 delightful to spend money on vain pleasures when you feel 
 you ought to buy a new coal-scuttle for the dining-room." 
 
 The giving up of the carriage eased considerably the 
 strain of adapting ways to means, and as long as Lady 
 Lowther was able to help them, the Gales stayed on in 
 Montagu Street. 
 
 But, two years after the brougham had been abandoned, 
 Bertha died, passing out of life as unostentatiously as she 
 had passed through it. The last part of that life was 
 fraught with pain ; but she who had been always weak was 
 now strong. She bore the bodily torture with a courage 
 which had failed her during the long years when she had 
 felt herself to be a traitor; for now, as she expressed it, 
 she could look herself in the face. And all the time she 
 was haunted by the thought of the hundreds of animals 
 subjected year after year, vainly and remorselessly, to suf- 
 fering such as hers; inoculated with the disease which 
 claimed her; unaided by the narcotics which soothed its 
 agonies. The little frail woman, dying of cancer, knowing 
 of science only certain of its methods, unskilled in ethical 
 argument, unlearned in theology, was cognisant of the great 
 truth that there is no valid sacrifice save that, self-offered, 
 of the sacrificed; none other from which ultimately evil
 
 342 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 will not spring in greater measure than good. She reasoned 
 out no theory, discerned no law; felt only that it must be 
 so ; and suffered with added poignancy in the knowledge of 
 deliberately inflicted suffering. 
 
 Her last articulate words were of those which long ago 
 had struck David's attention, and which Bertha applied to 
 herself and to all beings who, like or unlike herself, were 
 the victims either of moral cowardice or physical tyranny : 
 
 "Pray for the weak!"
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 SIDNEY GALE sat in his study reading the book which 
 made the name of Edgar Hall famous throughout the 
 world. A little bit of a study it was, in a house none too 
 big ; but Gale, as he read, was so deeply interested as to be 
 blind to his surroundings. Generally he was all too con- 
 scious of them, the hall-mark, as it seemed to him, of 
 failure. 
 
 It had cost him more than it had cost David to leave 
 Montagu Street. She, to be sure, had her sad hours, dis- 
 mantling the home of her greatest happiness ; packing some 
 of her treasures, parting with others; recognising the fact 
 that poverty had come to her and Gale, not as a passing 
 guest, but as a perpetual companion, and demanded con- 
 cessions to its claims. But there had been no bitterness in 
 her renunciation. Years ago, when she had married Gale, 
 she had counted the cost, knowing well that though, in 
 proclaiming her own views, she ran the gauntlet of criticism 
 and lost caste in her own particular world, the risks she 
 took in casting in her lot with his were of graver kind. 
 Gale himself had put those risks before her, and she had 
 answered: "Am I not called David, and shall I fear to 
 fight Goliath ?" Moreover, she had the consolation that a 
 woman always finds when her heart is satisfied. She had 
 been ambitious once, but it was sweet to sink ambition in 
 the right to share the lot of the man she loved; she had 
 given homage to strength, admired success; but Gale, 
 
 343
 
 844 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 staunch to his colours, had shown no weakness, and though 
 he had sunk in his profession, in purpose he had not failed. 
 
 But Gale, with his hand firm to the plough, permitting 
 himself no backward glance, passed, in the transference of 
 his household from Montagu Street to the neighbourhood 
 of the Harrow Eoad, through a valley of despondency, in 
 which were bitter spaces. Though he had said good-bye to 
 fame, he had not been able to oust ambition from his tem- 
 perament ; and the consciousness of his capacity to make a 
 name for himself, formerly so uplifting, was galling in cir- 
 cumstances which limited the area of competition. And 
 then there was the old thought that he had dragged David 
 down. Though she would not let him utter it, it was active 
 in his mind; and side by side with it went the thought of 
 his children (there were three now), their education, their 
 after lives. 
 
 David because she was less responsible, Gale said was 
 bolder. Lady Lowther's death had made a change impera- 
 tive, and it was better, David declared, to face it in all its 
 bearings, to grasp the nettle firmly and so stultify its sting. 
 
 "If the boys are clever, they must get scholarships; if 
 not, they must live on the level of their intelligence. We 
 will do all we can for them; and, after all, it is the men 
 who stand on their own legs and not on their fathers* 
 shoulders who often make the best of life." 
 
 Her robust reasoning made Gale laugh, and revived the 
 courage which in his younger days had risen superior to 
 risks ; nevertheless it had gone hard with him to move from 
 the pleasant house whose upper windows faced a garden 
 space, to the semi-gentility of Falmouth Street. Here his 
 skill, and the personal magnetism which is an essential 
 attribute of the born doctor, won him by and by a fresh
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 845 
 
 repute; but those days were not yet; and when Hall's book 
 appeared Gale had plenty of time to read it. 
 
 During the last few years, while Gale had been descend- 
 ing the ladder which stretches from fame to failure, Hall 
 had mounted it rung by rung. In his younger days he 
 had studied in various places, under various teachers, many 
 branches of science ; patient labour had made him a master 
 in some. Now he was a professor in the Institute which he 
 had entered as a student, and his printed utterances bore 
 the stamp of authority. 
 
 His book The New Gospel, it was called was widely 
 read, outside as well as within scientific circles; the Press 
 hailed it as a work of genius; scientists, as a complete 
 philosophy. "These piquant and learned 'Studies on 
 Human Nature/ " said The Seasons, "are the recreations 
 of a naturalist, the porerga of a thinker who, having sought 
 and found in more than one department of human knowl- 
 edge . . . sits down for awhile to rest by the wayside of 
 the via sacra, in order to reflect on the vanity of received 
 opinions." 
 
 "Those who read this remarkable work," said the 
 Stethoscope, "can convince themselves that the story and 
 the message of hope which it conveys are not the vain im- 
 aginations of megalomania, but the logical inferences to be 
 drawn from observed facts." 1 
 
 Gale, reading the "message of hope," marvelled, first at 
 the wide and deep knowledge displayed by the writer, sec- 
 ondly at the conclusions he drew from it. He knew that 
 his student friend had been steadily rising in the estimation 
 of the scientific world; he had not realised how thorough 
 had been the study which justified that rise. He under- 
 stood and appreciated it now; while on the other hand he 
 
 'App. 36.
 
 346 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 was unprepared for the arguments based by Hall on his 
 accumulated facts. It seemed wonderful that, mastering 
 so much, he should infer so little; Gale found himself dis- 
 appointed that his former friend's conceptions had not 
 grown with his knowledge. 
 
 The theory which Edgar Hall advanced was based on 
 the disharmonies existing between man and his environ- 
 ment, and in these disharmonies he found the source of 
 the troubles by which man is perplexed. He began by 
 stating that a general uneasiness disturbs the world to-day, 
 man finding himself at a loss in determining the course of 
 his life and in explaining his true relation to family, nation, 
 race, and humanity. Sicence, he said, had been reproached 
 with inability to solve moral and philosophical questions, 
 with merely destroying the foundations of religion, and 
 failing to replace them with anything more exact or en- 
 during. Nevertheless it was to science, and science alone, 
 that man must look for hope, happiness, and the solution of 
 all problems. 
 
 The first part of the book discussed the origin of man ; 
 together with that which is commonly called human nature ; 
 and man's material body, its organs and their functions. 
 It was preluded by a wonderful chapter on what Hall 
 termed beings inferior to man, but dealing chiefly with in- 
 sects and their habits. Here the magnitude of his knowl- 
 edge was displayed, and the patient thoroughness of his 
 investigations; Gale, reading it, felt his pulses quicken 
 with admiration and interest. 
 
 Of facts, acquired by diligent and painstaking inquiry, 
 Hall was a master; it was when he proceeded to draw de- 
 ductions from those facts, when he departed from narration 
 to inference, that Gale's attitude changed from satisfied 
 ecquiescence to critical disappointment.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 347 
 
 When Hall .affirmed, as Cranley-Chance had affirmed, 
 that Nature, in producing man, had made a sudden leap in 
 evolution, Gale's mind refused to accept the assumption; 
 nor did the arguments from analogy cited by the author 
 appear to him logically sufficient. Suddenly obtained va- 
 rieties in the evening primrose, and the case of Inandi, the 
 calculator, did not, for him, warrant the conclusion that 
 "man is a case of the arrested development of some simian 
 of ancient days," who, having become varied in specific 
 characters, produced offspring endowed with new char- 
 acters ; and that from this being, a monster from the zoo- 
 logical point of view, sprang a new race, the human. Inandi 
 did not produce a race of calculators; nor did it appear to 
 Gale that any number of varieties obtained from a single 
 plant, transmitting, indeed, their specific characters to their 
 descendants, but exhibiting characters, initiating species, 
 peculiar only to the original kingdom of the plant that 
 is to say, the vegetable formed a just basis for Hall's argu- 
 ment that it was possible by development of specific char- 
 acters to leap from one kingdom to another. 
 
 Having determined the origin of man, Hall went on to 
 survey those organs of man's body which he considered 
 superfluous, inefficient, or functionally at fault. It was to 
 what he termed the disharmonies of the body that he as- 
 signed a large part of man's unhappiness ; not his physical 
 sufferings only, but also his mental perplexities, his fore- 
 bodings, his discontent. For indeed, as Gale found, reading 
 on, not a part only, but the whole of man's unhappiness, 
 was, in this new gospel, charged to the account of the dis- 
 harmonious body ; since the fear of death, which, according 
 to Hall, was the arch destroyer of the enjoyment of life, 
 had its root in the physical disharmony. This fear, he 
 affirmed, had caused the creation and the failure of all
 
 348 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 religions and philosophies: men, fleeing from the fear of 
 death, sought to build up a belief by which they might look 
 forward to continuous life. 
 
 He parsed those philosophies and religions under review, 
 and in the review gave evidence of careful and extensive 
 study in a field to which Gale would not have expected him 
 to penetrate; giving proof at the same time, that he had 
 failed constantly to grasp the true meaning, the real sig- 
 nificance of many, if not most, of the theories which he 
 criticised. He condemned them all; as failures, as inade- 
 quate to combat the fear and misery by which man is beset. 
 Then, said he, came the youngest daughter of knowledge, 
 science, and marched with the weapon of scepticism upon 
 the fortresses of religious dogma, till between science and 
 religion open war was declared. 
 
 In Edgar Hall's philosophy there could be no truce be- 
 tween the two, far less a lasting agreement. Disease, which, 
 he averred, was the basis of philosophies interpreted by 
 him as pessimistic; physical disharmonies; and the fear of 
 death; these were the factors in man's discontent. Any 
 system which admitted others was unreasonable. Poets, 
 prophets, saints, were alike dreamers; their utterances and 
 experiences the outcome of brains unbalanced by the 
 spectacle of man's lack of harmony with his environment; 
 all evidence to the contrary was untrustworthy. 
 
 That was Hall's position; a position impregnable to 
 argument, since it precluded all hypotheses save the one 
 on which his own philosophy was founded. Viewed from 
 that position, the problem of hew to absolve man from 
 unhappiness found its solution in the mere statement of 
 the causes of that unhappiness. For, since disease and the 
 fear of death produced suffering, the destruction of both 
 must secure happiness.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 349 
 
 And then, having arrived at the theoretic solution of the 
 problem, Hall set himself to find the means by which that 
 solution might be put in practice. It was but logical, since 
 in the welfare of the body lay man's salvation, that he 
 should ignore all sentiment save such as is directly con- 
 nected with that welfare, and to that welfare subordinate 
 all that would appear to strengthen it. Why take into 
 account the pain of the animal world, justice in relation to 
 that world, when the sole consideration was how to obtain 
 immunity from disease, how to escape the fear of death? 
 Why contemplate pity, advocate courage, when in ruthless- 
 ness lay deliverance ; and man was to shape his course, not 
 towards the vanquishing of fear, but hi subservience to it? 
 
 This was the new gospel : that man was to abandon all 
 dreams of immortality, divinity, unselfish love, and cleave 
 to science alone; and that science, isolating herself from 
 religion as well as creeds, from philosophy, from all the 
 forces, actual if not tangible, which have swayed mankind 
 through the ages, should in that emancipated isolation use 
 all and every means to one sole end: the complete knowl- 
 edge of man as an organism, in order, through that 
 knowledge, to arrive at the discovery of antidotes to all 
 diseases. 
 
 The message of hope was this: that men should escape, 
 not death indeed, but the fear of death, by the prolongation 
 of life to an extent which would make death welcome when^ 
 it came. Man would drink so largely of the cup of life, as 
 to long for the end of the draught ; become so satiated with 
 living, as to crave extinction as a boon. 
 
 In describing the manner of this prolongation, Hall pro- 
 pounded his famous phagocyte theory of senile degenera- 
 tion; of the atrophy of the higher and specific cells of a 
 tissue and their replacement by hypertrophied connective
 
 350 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 tissue; and of the possibility of preventing degeneration 
 by strengthening the higher elements. The strengthening 
 was to be accomplished by means of the favourite child of 
 physiological science, the serum ; and, having discussed the 
 effects of certain sera as demonstrated by experiments, 
 'There seems here," he wrote, "a rational method by which 
 we may strive to strengthen the higher elements of the 
 human body, and so prevent them from growing old." 
 
 And the task seemed at first sight such an easy one, so 
 simple of fulfilment. All that was necesary was to mince 
 to fine atoms the organs of a dead human body ; the heart, 
 brain, liver, kidney or any other organ, the higher elements 
 of which, in living bodies, required strengthening ; to inject 
 these atoms into an animal ; and in a few weeks to draw off 
 sera which would act in the desired way. In reality the 
 difficulty of removing organs from dead bodies, sufficiently 
 soon after death to be in a suitable condition for injection, 
 presented, as Hall observed, a serious practical obstacle; 
 and even were this obstacle overcome, much time would be 
 required, many experiments, before the method could be 
 perfected. 
 
 Gale, held by interest, influenced by the persuasive atmos- 
 phere which the sincerity of the writer had infused into his 
 book, passing from the probable to the possible, from the 
 possible to the plausible, was arrested here by the protest 
 of his reason. 
 
 Dreams of immortality, of man's divinity and God's 
 reality, were they wilder than this scheme for the preserva- 
 tion of the body? Was this all logical inference from ob- 
 served facts, as the Stethoscope claimed ? Was there in it 
 nothing of the vain imaginations of megalomania? Was 
 science, isolated from all points of view save the material, 
 admitting no reality save physical phenomena, no hope
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 351 
 
 save in the understanding of those phenomena, free indeed 
 from phantasy, entirely exempt from, the bias of an un- 
 related attitude? 
 
 And for the message of hope? If this latest prophet 
 were a true one, if this new gospel were to realise itself in 
 practical fulfilment of its promises, would man find con- 
 tentment, happiness, peace, the answer to all his question- 
 ing, the satisfaction of all his desires, in the prolongation 
 of physical life till such time as he should tire of it? That 
 life would be cut off from contact with the great ones of 
 the past; from the conceptions of philosophers, the "fine 
 frenzy" of poets, the contemplation of states of conscious- 
 ness other than the material. For man, emancipated, free 
 from the fear of death, would find no interest in exploded 
 theories, founded on that fear. Of mental interests there 
 would remain science; of art, the branches that appeal to 
 the senses; of pleasures, physical enjoyment. The soul of 
 literature, of art, of imagination, would perish with the 
 soul of man. 
 
 Was the gain worth the price? Did the end commend 
 the means.-' Would man, trampling on those weaker than 
 himself, denying his higher intuitions, abjuring the im- 
 mortal to put on an added mortality; would man gain 
 much? 
 
 Gale, questioning, formulated his answer in yet another 
 question: "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole 
 world and lose his own soul?"
 
 CHAPTER LI 
 
 AND as he sat thinking of Hall's great book, the door 
 opened, and Hall himself came in. 
 
 "Hall!" Gale leapt to his feet. To him, in his aston- 
 ishment and his subjection to the traditions of unscientific 
 thought, it seemed for the moment as if it were the ghostly 
 and not the actual presentment of his former friend who 
 stood there looking at him. 
 
 "The last man you were thinking of, I suppose?" 
 
 "No, I happened just to be thinking of you. But the 
 last man, certainly, that I expected to see. Come and sit 
 down. How on earth did you get here?" 
 
 "Cab." 
 
 "Yes but the cab Don't answer me by saying 
 
 <horse.' " 
 
 "I saw Burdon yesterday, and he told me." Hall turned 
 his glance from the fire to Gale's face. "Jove ! what a fool 
 you've made of yourself !" he said. 
 
 Gale shrugged his shoulders. "You always thought me 
 a fool, so you shouldn't be surprised." 
 
 "Not a fool," corrected Hall; "you were a rowdy ass as 
 a student, but I knew you had brains." 
 
 "Thanks awfully," said Gale. Hall's plain speaking put 
 him at his ease ; this was not the famous scientist who was 
 talking to him, but the companion of his school and hos- 
 pital days. 
 
 "But now " said Hall, and gave a French shrug of 
 
 his shoulders. Gale's shrug had been English. 
 
 853
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 35S 
 
 "Is it worse to be born a fool or to have folly thrust 
 upon you ? Mine was thrust upon me by what I should call 
 conviction and you would call rot." 
 
 x-At one time I thought you were going to make a name ; 
 and you might have. You made me uneasy that evening 
 in Paris, though. After that I wasn't really surprised." 
 
 "I don't know that it matters enormously whether you 
 make a name." 
 
 "It matters, perhaps you will allow, whether you make 
 a living." 
 
 Gale flushed. "Yes. But not supremely," he added. 
 
 "I should have said it did supremely; for without a 
 living you can do nothing." 
 
 "I'll ease your concrete and particular fears by assuring 
 you that we have enough to live on. Speaking in the 
 abstract and generally, that's just where we differ, you and 
 I as to what matters supremely." 
 
 "Well, what does, according to Sidney Gale?" 
 
 "It sounds a bit priggish, put in two words, but I mean 
 it, so here goes ethical healthiness." 
 
 "Morality !" Hall's lip curled in the old way. "Is that 
 the bog you've stuck in?" 
 
 "Call it a bog if you like. I call it terra firma. Anyhow, 
 that's where I am; and I'd rather be there stuck, if you 
 like than follow the will-o'-the-wisp you're following 
 here." Gale put his hand on the book he had been reading. 
 
 "Ah, my book! May I ask what you call the will-o'- 
 the-wisp ?" 
 
 "The idea of making people happy by letting them live 
 on till they've had enough of it. And the means of doing 
 it feeding them upon sera obtained from the organs of 
 their dead fellows. You used to be a sober enough chap ; 
 but this seems to me, frankly, the idea of a monomaniac."
 
 354. PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "I state that it isn't perfected, that it will require much 
 time to work it out." 
 
 "It's the conception that seems to me so wild." 
 
 "You're frank, at any rate." 
 
 "Always was, if you remember. And besides, you vivi- 
 sectionists can't expect to have nothing but praise and the 
 unlimited and sole right of blackguarding. You pour out 
 contempt and scorn upon us; you call us fools and retro- 
 grade and sentimental and what not ; but you expect to be 
 exempt from criticism." 
 
 "We get it, though; not in France, but from the British 
 public unenlightened and stupid as it always has been 
 and will be." 
 
 "You'd get a good deal more if it were more enlightened 
 and less stupid. It's the ignorance of the public, French 
 as well as English, that allows you to go on." 
 
 Hall's lip curled again. "Science," he said, "is superior 
 to public opinion." 
 
 "And to mine of course, who am extra private; a private, 
 in fact, in the army which is fighting against you." 
 
 "An army, you call it? I should say one small regiment 
 fighting for a forlorn hope." 
 
 "It's forlorn hopes that have inspired the world and 
 conquered it in the end. And then we have new recruits 
 every day, even in France. We shall have an international 
 league against you before long." 
 
 Hall smiled. "Meanwhile the scientific spirit grows: in 
 England enormously. You are beginning to see over here 
 that research should be undertaken quite apart from its 
 directly utilitarian bearing, in a spirit of mere curiosity. I 
 dined with Langford last night, and he said straight out 
 that the greatest asset which a nation can have is to have 
 amongst itself a number of men endowed with this mere
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 355 
 
 curiosity, men who will put everything second to the ad- 
 vancement of knowledge. 1 Good that for an Englishman." 
 
 "Oh, if you call that good, virtue is not lacking over 
 here. I remember De Watteville, years ago, saying that 
 moral and pecuniary support should not be refused to hos- 
 pitals on the ground that their inmates are made use of 
 otherwise than for treatment. 2 That, of course, is the 
 logical outcome of what you call the scientific attitude. 
 That attitude would commend the action of Doyen in 
 taking a bit of cancerous matter out of a woman's bad 
 breast and inserting it into the healthy one. 3 That attitude 
 would applaud murder, if the murder of the few were of 
 benefit to the many." 
 
 Again Hall shrugged his shoulders. "Problematical 
 ethics hardly interest me. I tell you I am not concerned 
 with morality. I acknowledge but one duty hjgiene; on 
 the altar of that duty I lay everything; other people's mo- 
 rality, my own time, strength, brains, and money. How 
 many people will do that for their God?" 
 
 "All who really believe in the God they profess to 
 worship. As you instance your own case, I may instance 
 mine. But it's the same with everybody; you've only got 
 to care enough whether the thing you care for is bad or 
 good. Look at the miser. He gives up time, brains, com- 
 fort, friends, every enjoyment, even the enjoyment of 
 money, for the sake of hoarding. I don't say your aim isn't 
 nobler than the miser's, but your methods, by Jove! are 
 worse. For he sacrifices only himself, it is himself that 
 suffers; while you are careless of who suffers, or what; of 
 how great the suffering or how long." 
 
 "True; but both the miser and I have convictions and 
 
 'App. 37. 'APP. 38. *App. 39.
 
 356 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 act on them, which alone makes us of more worth than the 
 namby-pamby person who is supposed to have a conscience." 
 
 "I don't accept your premises, if you have no regard 
 to the character of the convictions. But anyhow, if that's 
 what you think, why do you quarrel with me for acting 
 on mine ?" 
 
 "Because look here, Gale " Hall got up, and Gale 
 
 rose too, and the two men stood on the hearthrug, facing 
 one another. "Look here, you're down on your luck. You 
 
 should have been in Harley Street by this time, and " 
 
 Hall looked round the little room ; not shabby exactly, for 
 the Gales still possessed a good deal of the furniture which 
 had been their pride in Montagu Street; but mean in its 
 proportions, and pervaded somehow by the spirit of the poor 
 neighbourhood which surrounded it. 
 
 "And it's obvious that I'm not," said Gale. "Well?" 
 
 "I've come over just for a day or two, on business I 
 needn't go into now. I heard about you from Burdon, as 
 I said, and others too, and I thought you might have come 
 to your senses, might take a chance if it was given you." 
 
 "It's good of you." 
 
 "There's a post, not much of a one, but I could get it 
 for you, if you'd be sensible own yourselves wrong you 
 and your wife." 
 
 "Thanks, but you'll know from what I've said that I 
 couldn't take it." 
 
 "Don't go and cut off your nose to spite your face! 
 Many a man's taken up a wrong line and dropped it again. 
 As for all this romance about animals and their rights, 
 leave that to the women who keep pet dogs; it doesn't 
 matter in them. But a man with a brain has something else 
 to think about. Give up this Salvation Army sentiment
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 357 
 
 business and join the priesthood of progress: it's the only 
 order with any virility." 
 
 Gale shook his head. 
 
 "Can't you get over your squeamishness ?" There was 
 a sneer in Hall's voice. 
 
 "Do like Smidovich, you mean. Have you seen his book? 
 I can't quite remember how he puts it." Gale took a book 
 from the table and turned the pages till he found what 
 he wanted. "Yes, here it is. 'There is but one way,' " he 
 read, " 'that of stifling the reproaches of conscience, of 
 choking down pity, and closing one's eyes to the living 
 agony of the animals sacrified.' 1 No, I couldn't do that. 
 I'd rather stay in what you call the Salvation Army." 
 
 "Then I may as well say good-bye." 
 
 "I have sometimes thought " Gale went on. "You 
 
 know there are men, Pirigoff for one, and Haller for an- 
 other, 2 who have confessed to being struck, later on hi life, 
 with a sense of the horrors they have committed; and I 
 have sometimes thought that this consciousness may come 
 to men who don't own to it not to all or to most, for in 
 most the capacity for pity is killed by the things they do. 
 But I have wondered sometimes, when I have heard of 
 inexplicable suicides, whether such recollections have had 
 anything to do with them. You, of course, will call that 
 fanciful." 
 
 "All anti-vivisectionists are fanciful," said Hall; and 
 then he said good-bye. 
 
 When he had gone Gale went back to the hearthrug and 
 stood with his back to the fire, thinking. Hall's offer had 
 been no temptation to him, and Hall's conversation had 
 heartened rather than discouraged him, made him more 
 friendly towards his own failure. 
 
 'App. 40. *APP. 4L
 
 358 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 Presently the door was gently and slightly opened, and 
 David's face looked round it. Seeing that Gale was alone, 
 she came in, on tip-toe, and with an air of pretended 
 mystery. 
 
 "Was it really and truly Edgar Hall?" she asked. 
 
 "Really and truly." 
 
 "Jane 1 said so, but I couldn't believe my ears. Whatever 
 brought him to our poor little shanty ?" 
 
 "He came to offer me a post." 
 
 "Oh, Sidney, don't start romancing." 
 
 "But he did." 
 
 "No!" 
 
 "Yes, you sceptic, yes." 
 
 "But Why?" 
 
 "Because he thought the Harrow Road might have 
 brought us to our senses." 
 
 "How did he know ?" 
 
 "From Percy." 
 
 "Oh, I see. Fancy the serpent condescending to such a 
 one-horse shay sort of Paradise.'' 
 
 "I dare say he meant it kindly though there was a 
 latent " 
 
 "Of course you didn't " 
 
 "No, I didn't. You needn't turn me out, Angel, with 
 your flaming sword." 
 
 " The man tempted me, and I didn't eat. If it had been 
 a woman now !" 
 
 "If you had tempted me, wanted it, it would have been 
 harder." 
 
 "I? Oh, I couldn't you know I couldn't have taken 
 it in any case. How did he take your refusal?" 
 
 "Oh well if his soul has shoulders I should think it 
 would shrug 'em all the way home."
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 359 
 
 "You were interested, though; your hair's so untidy." 
 
 Gale passed his hand over his head. "I was interested. 
 Hall is the same in a way, yet so absolutely different." 
 
 "He's probably himself developed. Have you finished 
 his book?" 
 
 "Very nearly. I was at it when he came in." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "It's full of learning, full of theories, full of brains." 
 
 "Yes, but the gist of it?" 
 
 "The gist?" Gale thought a minute. "You know the 
 saying, 'Death before dishonour 5 ?" 
 
 David nodded. "Of course." 
 
 "Well, the gist of Hall's book is that same saying, only 
 just the other way on; dishonour every and any sort of 
 cruelty, cowardice, oppression before death."
 
 CHAPTER LII 
 
 GALE was right: Hall's mental attitude, as he drove 
 away from Falmouth Street, was one of shrugged 
 shoulders. His motives in making his offer had been as 
 mixed as are the motives of most men when they pride 
 themselves on being generous. He was willing to help his 
 old friend for the sake, he told himself, of the old friend- 
 ship ; but he could not rid himself of a certain satisfaction 
 at being in a position to play the benevolent patron. In 
 their student days Gale had taken the upper hand, had 
 been carelessly arrogant, had received the larger share of 
 the devotion which Percy Burdon had divided between him 
 and Hall ; had, moreover, been called brilliant, whereas Hall 
 had had to put up with the adjective "steady." 
 
 It could not be said that these things rankled in Hall's 
 mind; yet it would not have been disagreeable to know 
 Gale grateful instead of lordly ; it would have been pleasant 
 to hear him confess himself in the wrong; it would have 
 been more than pleasant to hear Mrs. Gale join in the 
 confession. But now they had refused his helping hand; 
 they must therefore lie on their bed as they had made it; 
 Hall felt that if they ended in the workhouse, it was really 
 no more than they deserved. Then, with a final shrug, he 
 dismissed the thought of them; he had done more than 
 there was any need to do, and his mind, turning to his own 
 particular interests, had no space to spare for the per- 
 versities of failure. 
 
 The next day he returned to Paris. A fresh consignment 
 
 360
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 361 
 
 of apes was due ; and, after years of experiment, he thought 
 he saw the approach of success. It was all very well to 
 inoculate women and children in hospitals; science no 
 doubt had gained much from such practices; but the num- 
 ber of human subjects available was necessarily limited. 
 Prejudice stood in the way, and though the public was 
 obligingly indifferent, old-fashioned ideas might assert 
 themselves at any moment. The only sure and satisfactory 
 way was to introduce the great scourge of humanity into 
 the animal world. 
 
 Hitherto Hall, as well as everybody else, had failed in 
 achieving this result; it seemed as if on a race free from 
 vice the special disease of vice could not be imposed. To 
 all other diseases animals had succumbed at the hands of 
 man (though the cancer induced in animals was unfortu- 
 nately different from human cancer) ; but from this one 
 malady remained immune. But now Hall thought he saw 
 his way to its propagation; and for the next few months, 
 in company with a chosen colleague, all his energies were 
 devoted to the introduction of the most loathsome of dis- 
 eases into the bodies of the apes delivered over to him. 
 
 In the meantime, in the street off the Harrow Road, 
 Sidney Gale began a new career ; in a different spirit, in a 
 different atmosphere, with a different aim from the career 
 he had set out on when he left St. Anne's. Ambition was 
 banished perforce; he sought at first only to earn enough 
 money to make the proverbial two ends meet. 
 
 But, beginning in a spirit of dogged persistence, by and 
 by, as he worked, old interests revived and took on a new 
 vigour ; interests that had occupied him in other days when 
 he had studied disease in the slums. In those days he had 
 learned much ; but he learned now in a wider way ; realising 
 that those people who were so often the victims of disease
 
 362 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 were always and emphatically human beings; fragments 
 of society, citizens of the nation, an important part of the 
 community, having a direct hearing on its welfare. As he 
 lived and worked in this poorer quarter of the town, many 
 things were made plain to Gale which are constantly hid 
 from the successful and the famous. He learned that men 
 and women, struggling for food, clothes, shelter, differ not 
 at all from the women and the men who strive after posi- 
 tion, wealth, and fame; are open to the same incentives, 
 liable to the same impulses of meanness and generosity; 
 differ not at all, save that amongst the struggling poor the 
 incentives are more imperative, the impulses take their rise 
 in more primitive needs ; the meanness is less disguised, the 
 generosity more nearly allied to heroism. 
 
 And he learned, he and David together, working side by 
 side for a living and a home, fighting side by side for the 
 progress of the cause they had taken up, learned to see in 
 the problems of life, not a series of isolated and conflicting 
 questions, but the component parts of one related whole. 
 They saw that science is only at war with philosophy, 
 religion, morality when it narrows its scope to particular 
 fields of its own domain, cutting off the correspondence 
 between all phenomenal manifestation. They saw that 
 sociology is related to hygiene, hygiene to philosophy, phi- 
 losophy to ethics, ethics again to sociology. They saw that 
 disease cannot be dealt with by medicine alone; that 
 religious teaching is inadequate to cope with starvation; 
 that science, single-handed, is powerless against poverty. 
 Seeing all this, and not turning in disgust or despair from 
 the sight, but studying in all sincerity the conditions about 
 him, gradually Gale's ambition changed; was transformed 
 from the desire to dominate into the wish to serve. In his 
 younger days, fame, brilliant on the heights to which men's
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 363 
 
 eyes turn enviously, had beckoned to him with compelling 
 hand : now looking on the depths about him, he found that 
 what he wanted most to do was to kindle a little light 
 within their shades. Much talk he had heard of science 
 and the debt owed her by humanity; but when science bal- 
 anced her books, there were items in these shades, it seemed 
 to Gale, which could not be left out of the account. 
 
 "To think," he said one day, "of Hall elaborating a 
 method of prolonging life, when the conditions of masses of 
 people make the attainment even of maturity impossible; 
 and when workmen, after forty, yes, and even before forty, 
 are constantly refused the chance of earning a livelihood ! 
 It's pure mockery." 
 
 "How can a man know life from a laboratory?" asked 
 Cameron. "I could take him to streets in Paris where the 
 doctrine of salvation by sera would seem lamentably inade- 
 quate." 
 
 "No, you couldn't," said David. "I have been with him 
 through such streets, and he saw nothing outside his own 
 conceptions. For him salvation is only for the few the 
 idle, chiefly, and the morbid, who are haunted by the fear 
 of death. All the people who toil and suffer are to go on 
 toiling, suffering, dying, degenerating." 
 
 "It's curious," said Gale, "that medical science, since it 
 has been led by vivisection, seems to have said good-bye 
 not only to morality, but to common sense. It seems to 
 forget that it was common sense cleanliness, sanitation 
 which stamped out cholera, plague, typhus; that it was the 
 muzzling order which rid England of hydrophobia; that 
 scarlet fever which is uncombated by a serum has declined 
 as much with the improvement of sanitation as small-pox 
 aided by a vaccine." 
 
 "I don't think it's curious at all," said Cameron.
 
 36* PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "No, nor do I really; it was a figure of speech." 
 
 "People talk of ends justifying means; but often if a 
 body of men gets possessed by an idea, they subordinate 
 results to methods. Look at Semmelweiss, who more than 
 half a century ago discovered antiseptic surgery, who dem- 
 onstrated the truth of his discovery by the fact that his 
 patients lived, and patients treated in the old way died; 
 who was hounded into a lunatic asylum by the profession; 
 and whose theories, when advanced by Pasteur and Lister, 
 were accepted and acclaimed. 1 Eeason, deduction, the care 
 of patients, were out of court; only one proof availed with 
 the orthodox the proof by means of vivisection." 
 
 "One of the latest sera, I hear," said David, "is a serum 
 against fatigue. Judy told me about it. A German doctor, 
 Weichardt, takes guinea-pigs and makes them run on a 
 miniature treadmill till they fall dead from exhaustion; 
 and from the fatigued muscles he has succeeded in pro- 
 ducing an anti-fatigue toxin." 
 
 "Yes, I've heard of it," said Cameron. "It's the idea 
 of a neurotic. The experiments are described by Dr. Carl 
 Snyder in the Monthly, I think Judy said. He calls them 
 fascinating." 2 
 
 "I dare say they are to him. This idea of prolonging 
 bodily existence somehow, anyhow, is bound to distort the 
 imaginations of the men who are a prey to it; and I fancy 
 fcinyder is one." 
 
 "Evidently, from what Judy says. I have not read the 
 article." 
 
 "I shouldn't bother to, if I were you. I've glanced 
 through it, and it's just the same idea as Hall's. Tell me, 
 how is Judy getting on ?" 
 
 *App. 42. *App. 43.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 365 
 
 "Well, slowly; but surely, she says. It's up-hill work, 
 of course, but you know her energy." 
 
 "When I first knew Judith Home," said Cameron 
 "Judith West she was then she was a sort of leader of 
 fashion; of advanced views always, but fashionable first 
 and advanced after." 
 
 "When you first knew me," said David, "I was a rising 
 artist." 
 
 "And now you're risen." 
 
 "Just about as high as the horizon." 
 
 David had sought, in her poorest days, to turn her girl- 
 hood's talent to account, and, commercially speaking, had 
 met with some success. She smiled sometimes as she 
 worked at Christmas and birthday cards, at menus and 
 illustrations for catalogues, and looked back to the days 
 of the pink overalls or the more splendid ones of the studio 
 on Campden Hill. The smile, perhaps, was not devoid of 
 wistfulness. Her dreams of fame had been as sweet, as 
 brilliant, if not as definite and as well based as Sidney's; 
 and they had ended in painting cards at so much a dozen 
 in Falmouth Street off the Harrow Road ! 
 
 But she made money; and money, too, was sweet when 
 it meant new clothes and better education for the children; 
 hers and Sidney's. She never forgot Vi, the child whose 
 suffering had made for herself a special place, created a 
 special tenderness ; the thought of that child was often in 
 her mind when she did not speak of her, even to Sidney; 
 in her mother's heart Vi's memory was immortal. But 
 these other children, healthy and strong, were dear to her 
 in another, perhaps even a deeper, way; they were the off- 
 spring of her woman's love, and were girt about with the 
 joy of that love as well as with the tenderness of maternity. 
 
 When, presently, David had left the room, Cameron
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 turned to Gale. "Talking of old times, laddie," he said 
 (he still called the man sometimes by the name he had 
 used to the boy), "do you mind, when you first came to 
 my rooms, how we talked of greatness and failure?" 
 
 "To be sure. Certain things you said have always stuck 
 in my mind. But it's odd that you should remember." 
 
 "I've not lost my memory yet at least, not for the 
 things a bit back." 
 
 "You said I might be a great man or a great surgeon, 
 I remember; and I remember that, when you said it, I 
 tingled all over. And now I'm neither." 
 
 "I'm no so sure. And you said you wouldn't mind fail- 
 ure, if you failed splendidly." 
 
 "This" Gale waved an indicating hand "is hardly 
 splendid." He laughed. "What a conceited young ass I 
 must have been !" 
 
 Cameron did not answer at once; then he said: "He 
 was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and 
 acquainted with grief; sorrows not all His own; a grief 
 not selfish. That's teepical," he added, with the Scotch 
 accent that always turned his tongue when it uttered what 
 he strongly felt. "You cannot win the right to the great 
 renunciation without being a bit finer than your fellows; 
 you cannot make it without falling, in their eyes, a long 
 way below them."
 
 CHAPTER LIII 
 
 THREE years later Hall was again in England; but 
 this time he did not find his way to Falmouth Street. 
 He had come over to give the Harben Lectures, and his time 
 was spent in the company of distinguished scientists. 
 
 Nor did he even so much as think of the Gales. Three 
 years ago he had dismissed them from his mind; they 
 belonged no more to the world with which he was con- 
 cerned, but were cast into the outer darkness reserved for 
 moralists, philosophers, and anti-vivisectionists. 
 
 Percy Burdon came up from Essex to welcome him ; and 
 was continually coming up from Essex, whenever he could 
 spare a day or half a day, to revive and cement the former 
 friendship. Hall was a little bored by Percy, whose pre- 
 sumption on the claim of old acquaintance was more ef- 
 fusive than discreet. To be sure he had now the whole of 
 that allegiance which had once been shared with Gale; for 
 Percy, though he had still a soft spot in his heart for "old 
 Sidney," was too much disappointed by his quondam 
 paragon's failure to make a name to retain for him the 
 admiration which had been once his unquestionable tribute. 
 
 His admiration now was all for Hall, and stories of the 
 great man's youth were retailed by him at the dinner 
 parties in Langborough and for miles around. For Percy 
 was widely known in the county now; he had fulfilled his 
 intention of keeping abreast of the times; was talked of as 
 
 867
 
 368 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 up to date and versed in the latest surgical and medical 
 science of the day; and had removed gall bladders not 
 to speak of other parts of the human frame without im- 
 mediately disastrous results to the patients; that is to say, 
 to all of them. Some perished ; but Burdon always assured 
 their friends that they would have died in any case, and, 
 unassisted by himself, in greater agonies than those in- 
 flicted by the tenderness of scientific perspicacity. And the 
 friends, with unquestioning confidence for the most part 
 laid the flattering unction to their souls and were con- 
 tent. So Burdon prospered, and his Polly, grown matronly, 
 was proud of him. 
 
 Nevertheless, though he might draw flames from the 
 Colne, he was hardly competent to set fire to the Thames ; 
 and his continual visits to the capital had upon Hall some- 
 thing of the effect of repeated efforts to strike damp 
 matches. Percy was not even a match from Hall's point of 
 view; but he would persist in trying to strike himself on 
 Hall, and never got further than spluttering, which was 
 irritating to a shining light needing no aid from indiscrim- 
 inate sparks. 
 
 Edgar Hall's lectures were three in number. They were 
 eagerly looked forward to, largely attended, highly ap- 
 plauded. They were distinguished by the knowledge which 
 he had acquired; by the intelligence which was innate in 
 him ; by the lucidity of which he was a master ; and by the 
 faith in his own premises and methods which are as neces- 
 ary to the orthodox scientist as to the dogmatic religionist. 
 
 The last lecture was specially interesting, in that it con- 
 tained what might be looked upon as his profession of faith, 
 the sum of his philosophy; for no man, though he may 
 repudiate the philosophies of others, can escape from one of
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 869 
 
 his own. Certainly Edgar Hall could not, as is testified by 
 the third of his Harben Lectures. 1 
 
 The subject of this final lecture was that world-wide 
 disease which, together with certain other world-wide hor- 
 rors, is labelled unmentionable; the disease which for the 
 last several years had engaged Hall's attention and ingenu- 
 ity; the disease which for so long had been rejected, against 
 all attempts to propagate it, by the animal world. But 
 Edgar Hall had triumphed over the barriers of kingdom, 
 had triumphed over all barriers which stood, or might have 
 stood, in the way of his success. For him, indeed, the 
 divisions of Nature's kingdoms could hardly be said to 
 exist save as convenient modes of classification. For him 
 there existed only intelligence and the prey of intelligent ; 
 the difference between sentient and non-sentient life carried 
 no significance, except that creatures who could feel pain, 
 suffer starvation, be subjected to disease, presented a more 
 potent field for the researches of science than did that of in- 
 organic matter. His attitude was the attitude of modern 
 science; and the attitude of large numbers of the lay public; ; 
 who assume it either without thought ; with that confusion 
 of thought common to those who, while professing belief 
 in spirit, subordinate the attributes of spirit love, mercy, 
 courage to the immediate welfare of the flesh ; or with the 
 frank and logical selfishness of tbe avowed materialist. 
 
 Hall, firm in that faith of selfishness which makes all 
 things in the way of cruelty possible, had achieved success : 
 he had infected the animal world with the supreme disease 
 of vice. His third lecture dealt with the experiments which 
 that success had enabled him to make. 
 
 In its course he spoke of the wide extent of the malady 
 which he was discussing; of the rapid spread of infection, 
 
 'App. 44.
 
 370 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 in districts unprotected by ordinary hygienic precautions; 
 of the importance of combating its ravages. The experi- 
 ments he described were the means by which he sought to 
 forge weapons for the combat ; characteristic weapons ; sera, 
 vaccines, ointments. The one weapon which he did not 
 suggest was an axe which might be laid at the root of the 
 tree: his aim was to allow the tree to grow and then to 
 render it barren. For the curbing of bodily desires was 
 contrary to Edgar Hall's philosophy. He, to be sure, had 
 sacrificed much to the cause of that science in which he 
 found richer pleasures than those which he denied himself ; 
 but, from the substitution of one desire for another, he 
 drew no suggestion of a principle. Control of instincts was 
 inseparable, for him, from the medieval idea of asceticism, 
 denial for denial's sake, an end in itself. He had not faced, 
 or facing had not grasped, the conception that it is worth 
 while to subdue an impulse for the sake of evolving a force ; 
 that the basis of the law of sacrifice is not futile waste but 
 fuller attainment. 
 
 For him, then, inclination justified indulgence. There 
 could be no doubt, he stated in his lecture, that the restric- 
 tion of liberty in sexual matters was disagreeable and 
 vexatious : yet the regulation of vice in the present order of 
 things was, even though its action were imperfect, unfortu- 
 nately necessary. Progress lay, as lies all progress as de- 
 fined by the new order of priesthood, in the direction, not 
 of the abolition of an evil, but in the discovery of an anti- 
 dote to its discomforts. It would be a great step forward, 
 he asserted, if some method were arrived at, which made 
 regulation and all intervention by public authorities super- 
 fluous; and thus insured mankind against the consequences 
 of vice by practical and simple means, dependent only on 
 the will of those risking contagion.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 371 
 
 The search for a serum to achieve this end had been so 
 far a failure, in spite of the time, the intelligence, and the 
 animals devoted to the quest : he was disposed to think that 
 in the direction of vaccines lay a better prospect of success. 
 Yet vaccination, if used on a large scale, might bring about 
 ' awkward complications, and could, possibly, only be applied 
 to those persons subject to the greatest risk. Its first sub- 
 jects, said the lecturer, would have to be young girls, the 
 beginners in prostitution; since to them and their clients 
 vaccination would be an undoubted advantage. No con- 
 siderations of a moralising tendency should be allowed to 
 interfere with any and every means of fighting this foe to 
 man's physical liberty ; nay, averred Hall, even though some 
 of the finest works of genius were undoubtedly due to the 
 cerebral excitement caused by its action. 
 
 And then, in the last words of the lecture, came the 
 summed-up, definite declaration of Edgar Hall's faith. In 
 the religions of old, he allowed, hygienic precepts occupied 
 an important place ; but he drew from the fact no deduction 
 as to the possibility of religion and hygiene having a com- 
 mon and inseparable origin. On the contrary, he insisted 
 upon the necessity of their divorce; and, that achieved, 
 hygiene was to be queen and morality slave. Morality 
 should not attempt to lead hygiene, but should rather follow 
 her. Hygiene should reign supreme, said he in his perora- 
 tion, over all moralising doctrines. 
 
 The large hall, crowded with listeners, rang with cheer 
 after cheer : the representatives of science gave to science's 
 high priest a great ovation. He had declared their faith, 
 and they affirmed it; he had pointed out their goal, and 
 they acknowledged it England was no laggard in the path
 
 372 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 of progress; England recognised and acclaimed the leader 
 of a world-wide gospel. . 
 
 She gave him, by the hands of her representative scien- 
 tists, a gold medal: she cheered him afresh as she pre- 
 sented it. 
 
 "The old order changeth, giving place to new," and the 
 old order, as the cheering crowd conceived it, was con- 
 demned that night by their cheers; its prejudices flung 
 aside, its ideals overthrown. On, on, into the new kingdom, 
 ruled by the new priesthood, fashioned by the new progress ! 
 
 In that kingdom morality has no place, and mercy finds 
 no foothold : on its threshold stands love, and looks linger- 
 ingly at the travesty of herself that has usurped her place. 
 In that kingdom men, emancipated, knowing that they 
 have no being save in the material; no hope save in the 
 lengthening of mortal life; no joy that transcends the 
 physical; no victories to achieve save the conquest of the 
 forces of Nature, the seizure of her secrets, the subjugation 
 of her laws; need only to go on from freedom to greater 
 freedom, from knowledge to completer knowledge, till 
 science has banished all prejudices of compunction, all 
 necessity of restraint ; and, in the great glory of unfettered 
 intelligence, humanity attains the summit of that emi- 
 nence, at the foot of which, in ages far away, was brought 
 forth the product of the Simian monster, Man. 
 
 Two schemes of evolution. 
 
 A spirit, moving, in the mystery of life, through all forms 
 till it attains to full consciousness of its divinity. 
 
 A monster, all-contained in form, marching from un- 
 thinking brutality to unscrupulous intelligence.
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 373 
 
 In the one conception mind is the master of the body : in 
 the other, its servant. 
 
 In the one, man fights, in his advance, cowardice, cruelty, 
 selfishness. In the other, pity, mercy, love, are the barriers 
 to man's progress.
 
 CHAPTER LIV 
 
 EDGAR HALL, driving home that night, passed not 
 far from the street where long ago Percy Burdon had 
 lived; where Cameron still lived; where, had Hall but 
 known it, Cameron and Judith, David and Gale were at 
 that moment gathered together. 
 
 Had he known, the knowledge certainly would have ex- 
 cited in him no interest; these people, companions of his 
 chrysalis stage, were no longer real to him ; grubs still, they 
 had no part in his life of splendid flight. Yet the familiar 
 landmarks called up to him a picture of Burdon's room; 
 with its photographs of girls in tights on the mantelpiece ; 
 its antimacassars that took the place of repartee; and Gale 
 Gale would not stay out of the picture shaking out his 
 hair and laughing his uproarious laugh. What a fool the 
 fellow had been ! What a fool ! And that wife of his, who 
 might have been his own wife, a reigning power in the 
 Parisian world of intellect ! Hall had no sentiment left for 
 David. She had shown herself unworthy of his preference ; 
 he despised, but did not regret her. 
 
 The "grubs" in Cameron's room were thinking even less 
 of Hall than Hall was thinking of them. They were busy, 
 while the mental picture in which two of them figured 
 was passing through Hall's mind, in discussing the pros- 
 pects of the hospital on whose staff Gale had now a place. 
 A hospital formed on anti-vivisectional lines it was, using 
 no vivisectional remedies, permitting no experimental sur- 
 
 374
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 375 
 
 gery; the operations performed in it were never performed 
 without the consent of the patients or the patients' friends. 
 The efforts of several pioneers had resulted in the enterprise 
 of starting it ; a few men, risking their practices in favour 
 of their principles, had supported the enterprise with all 
 they had to give; skill, time, names, energy. It was es- 
 tablished, and was fighting its way against prejudice and 
 contempt. Scouted by the profession, excluded from par- 
 ticipation in publicly collected funds, its methods were de- 
 nounced, its efficiency questioned. Yet it endured. The 
 poor who dwelt about and around it sought its aid year by 
 year in increasing numbers ; its death rate was low ; its sup- 
 porters were staunch. A sign of the times, its significance 
 was underrated by its traducers ; a prophet, it was labelled, 
 in its native land of medicine, with the time-worn title of 
 impostor. 
 
 To Gale it was a new and unfailing interest in his busy 
 life ; a life in which he became, with each succeeding year, 
 more settled and content. The desire for fame had ceased 
 to torment him. All his energy was given to helping on 
 the causes for which he worked; the protection of the 
 animal world, and the relief of those vast masses of the 
 poor who are hardly more articulate than animals, and 
 almost as helpless. 
 
 To Gale, as to Cameron, the two causes were almost in- 
 separable. Experiment in the one world led to experiment 
 in the other was the premise which experience laid down ; 
 and it became all too patent to Gale that mercy, sympathy, 
 honour, banished from man's dealings with the brute cre- 
 ation, found scant asylum in his dealings with the defence- 
 less of his own race. 
 
 The hospital was not the only subject of discussion that 
 evening of Hall's last lecture.
 
 376 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 "And the League?" said Gale, looking across to where 
 Judith Home walked, with her hands behind her, to and 
 fro past the windows. 
 
 Those windows were open, and the May air, soft but way- 
 ward, stirred her hair as she went. The hair was nearly 
 white now, and the face beneath it showed that Judy had 
 left the youth, which had stayed with her so long, behind 
 her on the road of life. But she was upright as she had 
 ever been; and it was still her habit to walk, with hands 
 clasped behind her, as she had walked in her younger days, 
 when talking of things that interested and moved her. She 
 was interested now; moved, too, by an influx of hope, a 
 vision of success. 
 
 "In a year," she said, "the League will be started, I 
 promise you. In all the countries I have been to, there are 
 men and women, medical men and women, waiting and 
 eager to join it. There's a lot of organising to be done still, 
 of course, a lot of rebuffing to be gone through, a number 
 of tiresome people people are so often tiresome, even when 
 they're quite intelligent and positively humane to be 
 shaken into shape and cajoled into action. Still, you'll see ; 
 next year I'll start the League." 
 
 "Good luck to it!" said Gale. "And to herself that's 
 had the pluck to form it." 
 
 "Herself must go home now." 
 
 "Will you have a cab ?" Cameron asked. 
 
 "No, thank you. There's a young man of the name of 
 Guppy will see me through the streets. Gupp, come here !" 
 
 " Did you take the name from Bleak House ?" said Gale, 
 as a sheep dog rose from a corner of the room, shook him- 
 self, and came in a trot across the floor. 
 
 "Of course." 
 
 The dogs of Lapelliere days had passed, in the peace of
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 377 
 
 old ago, from the lap of life ; Guppy was a young dog, wide 
 of head, cobby of body, showing all the points of a first-rate 
 speciment of his breed; his eyes, deep brown and very 
 bright, looked up at Judy with the unfaltering trust and 
 loyalty which is the essence of dog nature. Judy, not 
 having a scientific mind, would have died rather than betray 
 that trust ; for in Judy's estimation there were many things 
 worse than death. Betrayal was one of these things, even 
 though the betrayed were infinitely weaker, immeasurably 
 less intelligent than the betrayer. She had a code of honour 
 in which helplessness demanded protection rather than 
 abuse; a code ol courage which shrank from cruelty more 
 than from pain, which feared meanness more than death. 
 
 She and Guppy went together through the evening 
 streets. Each was the protector of the other; between 
 them was a comprehending companionship; in neither was 
 the fear of death. 
 
 The next morning in all the papers was an account of 
 Hall's ovation. Cameron read it and said nothing, since 
 there was nobody at hand to speak to. 
 
 Judy read it, and remarked to Guppy: "To every king, 
 praise from his own subjects." 
 
 David read it aloud to Gale while Gale ate his breakfast. 
 "You might have been a famous man," she said, "if " 
 
 "And you might certainly have been a famous man's 
 wife, if 
 
 "Would you change?" asked David. 
 
 "Would you?" 
 
 Neither of them answered the questions in words; but 
 they looked into each other's eyes and smiled.
 
 CHAPTER LV 
 
 JUDY kept her promise. In the year after Edgar Hall's 
 Harben Lectures, her league was formed; an associa- 
 tion, medical, international, to combat vivisection. 
 
 The day when it held its first meeting was a red-letter 
 day to Judy, and to that small company of men and women 
 who, working in the cause of humaneness, are persuaded 
 that they are working also in that of humanity. The com- 
 pany is small compared with the numbers of those who are 
 actively hostile or selfishly indifferent: yet it grows. 
 
 Side by side with what is called, by a certain school of 
 scientists, the scientific spirit, there is rising, spreading, 
 strengthening, a spirit which questions the science of that 
 school ; which perceives in the existence of love the manifes- 
 tation of a law ; which discerns in man finer elements than 
 those concerned with the preservation of his body. And 
 this spirit brings recruits to the ranks of the growing com- 
 pany. 
 
 In these ranks fight many of the foolish of the world, 
 many of the odd, the eccentric, the peculiar; together with 
 men keen of perception, robust of intelligence, vigorous of 
 act. And now and again, and ever more frequently, men 
 detach themselves from the hostile camp or the huge army 
 of the unthinking, and join the growing company. Now it 
 is a man of concrete creed, who becomes all at once aware 
 that the God he imagined he was worshipping is actually 
 and in truth a God of love, anil that love allows no limits 
 
 878
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 379 
 
 to its action ; now it is a specialist in disease, who has given 
 his life to the study of a particular malady and finds that 
 laboratory methods lead to false conclusions; and again, it 
 is a thinker whose thought forbids him to accept the dogma 
 of dead matter and brute force. Braving scorn, risking 
 failure, impelled by a power of reason or of right, in ones 
 and twos these leave the dominated many or the ruling few, 
 and join the growing company. 
 
 The company grows with a growth unperceived of its 
 opponents. Its cause is labelled lost, its vitality denied, its 
 progress unnoted. Yet its numbers increase, its influence 
 spreads; in all parts of the world signs of the spirit that 
 animates it spring up. Time, that instrument of evolution, 
 can but aid it, since this spirit of a wider love, a deeper 
 consciousness, a subtler perception of the unity of mani- 
 fested existence, is not the lingering remains of a dying 
 sentiment, but the latest unfolding of man's possibilities. 
 The narrow view is constantly false; the gaze fixed on the 
 powers that be misses not seldom the advent of forces that 
 are yet to come; it is on the horizon that the sun first 
 shows itself. 
 
 The company grows, though of visible results the harvest 
 still is small. 
 
 "For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
 Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 
 
 And not by eastern windows only 
 
 When daylight comes, comes in the light, 
 
 In front the sun climbs slow how slowly ! 
 But westward, look ! the land is bright."
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 1. It was reported in the Daily News of the 29fh May, 
 ] 906, that a dog did seek refuge in the way described, but 
 it was given back to a doctor who came in search of it. 
 
 2. The operation described in Chapter VI actually oc- 
 curred. The author was informed of it by a doctor whose 
 friend, a surgeon, witnessed it. 
 
 3. The operation described in Chapter XV was per- 
 formed on the sister of an intimate friend of the author's. 
 
 4. Medical Priestcraft, by John Shaw, M.D., p. 161. 
 
 5. Morning Leader, 26th January, 1899. 
 
 6. Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital for July, 
 1897. 
 
 7. Bill introduced 2nd March, 1900. 
 
 8. Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 6th and 13th 
 of August, 1896. 
 
 9. New York Medical Record of the 10th September, 
 1892. 
 
 10. British Medical Journal of the 3rd July, 1897. 
 
 11. Deutsche Medinische Wochcnschrift of the 19th Feb- 
 ruary, 1891. 
 
 12. New YorTc Independent of the 12th September, 1895. 
 
 13. Dr. Herbert Snow, who was for twenty years surgeon 
 at the Brompton Cancer Hospital, has read and approved 
 this passage. 
 
 14. Dr. John Shaw in Medical Priestcraft, p. 131. Dr. 
 Eder in New Age of 18th April, 1908. The author heard 
 
 381
 
 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 an eminent surgeon state at a public dinner that a medical 
 man who was an anti-vivisectionist must be either a knave 
 or a fool. 
 
 15. The theory in this chapter that the destiny of man is 
 to fight against Nature's rule instead of being guided by 
 it is taken from The Kingdom of Man, by Professor Sir 
 E. Ray Lankester, K.C.B. 
 
 16. Revue Scientifique of the 24th of March, 1906. Title 
 of article, "La Valeur de 1 'experimentation sur Fhomme en 
 pathologie experimentale." 
 
 17. The Times of the 27th June, 1891 ; British Medical 
 Journal of the 29th August, 1891. 
 
 18. Deutsche Medinische Wochenschrift of the 19th Feb- 
 ruary, 1891. 
 
 19. Therapeutics, by Sidney Ringer, pp. 498-503 (Eighth 
 Edition). 
 
 20. Told to the author by a distinguished French 
 physician. 
 
 21. Experiments on Animals, by Stephen Paget. 
 
 22. Revue Scientifique of the 24th March, 1906. 
 
 23. The Medical Press and Circular of the 29th March, 
 1899. 
 
 24. Text Book of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, or the 
 Action of Drugs in Health and Disease (Fourth Edition, 
 1906), by Professor Cushny, pp. 189-208. Surgical Dis- 
 eases of the Dog and Cat, by Professor Hobday. 
 
 25. The experiment described in this chapter is taken 
 from an article which appeared in the British Medical 
 Journal of the 4th November, 1906. 
 
 26". The author was told of these sounds by friends who 
 lived near a large hospital. 
 
 27. Article in the British Medical Journal, cited in 25 
 supra.
 
 APPENDIX 383 
 
 28. Life of Claude Bernard, by Sir Michael Foster, p. 204. 
 
 29. Therapeutics, by Sidney Ringer (Eighth Edition), 
 pp. 585, 588, 590, 591. 
 
 30. Revue des Deux Mondes of the 5th February, 1883. 
 
 31. An Experimental Research into Surgical Shock, by 
 George W. Crile, A.M., M.D., PH.D. If it is objected that Dr. 
 Crile is an American and that experiments of this kind are 
 not and cannot be carried out in England, I would mention 
 that Dr. Crile himself informs us that the first sixteen of 
 them were performed in Sir Victor Horsley's Laboratory 
 in London University College. It is worthy of note that 
 this book earned for its author the Cartwright Prize, and 
 also that, as I was informed at the London office of the 
 publishers, it has sold better than any other of his works. 
 (G. Colmore.), 
 
 32. Pasteurism in India, by Sir James Thornton, K.C.B. ; 
 "Pasteur's Prophylactic," an article by Dr. Chas. Bell 
 Taylor, M.D., which appeared in the National Review of 
 July, 1890; Pasteur and Serotherapy, by Dr. A. Lutand, 
 editor in chief of the Journal de Medicine de Paris. 
 
 33. Pasteurism in India, cited 32 supra. 
 
 34. Report of the Metropolitan Asylums Board, 1905. 
 
 35. The debate described in this and the preceding chap- 
 ter is an actual debate which took place on the 6th of May, 
 1907, at the Portman Rooms, at which the author was 
 present. A verbatim report can be obtained from Miss 
 G. M. Ansell, 70 Chancery Lane, W.C. 
 
 36. The book here referred to is The Nature of Man, by 
 E. Metchnikoff, and reviews given are quoted from extracts 
 from The Times and the Lancet, printed on the fly-leaves of 
 the English edition of 1906. 
 
 37. Report of the most recent Royal Commission on 
 .Vivisection. Question 3737.
 
 384 PRIESTS OF PROGRESS 
 
 38. Letter to the Standard of the 24th November, 1883, 
 entitled "The Use of Hospital Patients," by Dr. de Watte- 
 ville. 
 
 39. British Medical Journal of the 29th August, 1891. 
 
 40. Confessions of a Physician, by Smidovich, p. 152. 
 
 41. Report of Royal Commission on Vivisection, 1875, 
 pp. 64 and 223. 
 
 42. For an account of Serumelweiss's work?, see Experi- 
 ments on Animals, by Stephen Paget (Third Edition), pp. 
 80-83. Dr. Paget is, of course, not responsible for the use 
 which Cameron makes of the facts. 
 
 43. Article by Dr. Karl Snyder which appeared in the 
 Monthly Review of September, 1906. 
 
 44. The main points of Hall's lecture are taken from the 
 report of the Third Harben Lecture which appeared in 
 the Journal of Preventive Medicine of August, 1906. This 
 lecture was delivered at Bang's College, London, by Pro- 
 fessor MetchnikofL
 
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