"Yes. She told him that he was to blame for the whole situation; that, if he hadn't run amok, she would be jogging contentedly along the path of ancestral Calvinism. Moreover, the fact that there is more than a grain of truth in her contention doesn't lessen the sting that it has left behind. Now, as a natural consequence, the strain over, he is letting go entirely. He is made like that. Unless we want him to go to pieces utterly, we shall either have to invoke the aid of circumstance, or else bring him up with a round turn, ourselves." "How?" the professor queried flatly. "A man in his position is not amenable to discipline." "I'm not so sure of that." The doctor chuckled. "I am a trustee, you know." "Then he'll resign." "Not a bit of it. He may threaten it, may talk grand and elevated nonsense concerning freedom of speech and all the rest of it. When it comes to resignation, though, he will draw in his horns. His life is in that laboratory of yours." "And in his students?" "No. There's the trouble. It's the idea itself he's after, not its growing grip upon the world at large." "Then what makes him----" The professor paused for the fitting word. The doctor supplied it, and remorselessly. "Explatterate? Because it's a part of him to talk forth his imaginings, and, just at the present hour, he lacks all proper outlet but his class. Something has gone bad inside the man; no wonder, though, when one thinks of all that he has gone through. Even you, Opdyke, will never know the worst of that. Still, we shall have to put some sort of brake upon him; he can't go on like this." For a little while, the professor smoked in silence. "Can't you warn him unofficially, Keltridge?" he asked then. "That he is disgracing the department?" "No. That he is wrecking his final chance to amount to anything that's practical? That, if he holds on here, he must keep within some sort of limits in the things he says? That, if he lets go this present opportunity, he'll turn into the worst of all things, a mental derelict?" The doctor groaned at the suggestion. "Opdyke, I'll be hanged if I'll put in all my time, playing intellectual wet-nurse to Scott Brenton! I've served my turn. If ever he began to cut his wisdom teeth, it's time he was about it." The professor took up the metaphor and cast it back upon the doctor. "A good many babies die of teething," he said. "I've heard you say, yourself, that it was the one time in all a man's life when he was most dependent on the ministrations of the doctor." The doctor rose and straightened up his shoulders. "Fairly caught," he confessed. "Well, I'll do my best. Meanwhile, how is Reed?" "Too busy to think much about himself." "Not overworking?" the doctor questioned sharply.