Milford was conducted to an upper room, furnished with two chairs, a worn carpet and a table. But the Professor entered it reverently, as if it were the joss-house of hope. He turned down his light to steady the flame, placed the lamp upon the table, motioned his visitor to a chair, sat down, drew a pile of papers toward him, and said: "My dear fellow, I think I have something here that will tide me over the quarterly rapids. I believe that among these sheets lie a life insurance premium of ninety-seven dollars and forty cents. I want you to hear it, and then I will steal it forth to that woman. Now, in writing for a professional man, a physician, we will say, you must of all things employ sky-scraping terms. Medicine has no use for the simple. I wanted to start off with a cloud-capped sentence, a quotation, and here is one I found in Hazlett, referring to old Sir Thomas Brown: 'He scooped an antithesis from fabulous antiquity and raked up an epithet from the sweepings of chaos.' Isn't that a wild pigeon with the sun on its back?" "Yes, I know, but what has it to do with an article on medicine?" "Everything. Now let me tell you something. In a paper of this sort you must take a text, and with sophistry draw your deductions. You must never be clear. In the opinion of the world involution is depth. It takes a simple book a hundred years to become a classic. The writer has starved to death. He sleeps under marble. And who is it that is lost out there among the briars? The man who wrote the pampered fad. Yes, sir; let contemporaneous man seek to untangle your skein and you flatter him. Now, listen." He read his paper, making alterations from time to time, marking out small words and writing in larger ones; and when he was done he looked at his visitor with a smile. "It catches me," said Milford. "I don't know anything about it, but I'm caught all the same. Have you read it to the ladies?" "What!" gasped the Professor. "Read it to them? They would scoff at me, not because they would catch its pretentious weakness, but because I wrote it--because I am a failure. And now, sir, do you know I begin to fall down, as the idiomatics would have it? Yes, sir, I am weakening." "How so?" "Why, I've hardly got the nerve to take it to that woman. She hasn't said so, but I know she wants it. When do you expect to see her again?" "I don't know."