It chanced that as he emerged upon the landing, Enid, who had been engaged in her morning’s shopping, appeared in the lift. Malone’s easy Irish conscience allowed him to think that the six months need not start on the instant, so he persuaded Enid to descend in the lift with him. It was one of those lifts which are handled by whoever uses them, and on this occasion it so happened that, in some way best known to Malone, it stuck between the landing-stages, and in spite of several impatient rings it remained stuck for a good quarter of an hour. When the machinery resumed its functions, and when Enid was able at last to reach her home and Malone the street, the lovers had prepared themselves to wait for six months with every hope of a successful end to their experiment.[E] CHAPTER XIV IN WHICH CHALLENGER MEETS A STRANGE COLLEAGUE Professor Challenger was not a man who made friends easily. In order to be his friend you had also to be his dependent. He did not admit of equals. But as a patron he was superb. With his Jovian air, his colossal condescension, his amused smile, his general suggestion of the god descending to the mortal, he could be quite overpowering in his amiability. But he needed certain qualities in return. Stupidity disgusted him. Physical ugliness alienated him. Independence repulsed him. He coveted the man whom all the world would admire but who in turn would admire the superman above him. Such a man was Dr. Ross Scotton, and for this reason he had been Challenger’s favourite pupil. And now he was sick unto death. Dr. Atkinson of St. Mary’s, who has already played some minor part in this record, was attending him, and his reports were increasingly depressing. The illness was that dread disease, disseminated sclerosis, and Challenger was aware that Atkinson was no alarmist when he said that a cure was a most remote and unlikely possibility. It seemed a terrible instance of the unreasonable nature of things that a young man of science, capable before he reached his prime of two such works as “The Embryology of the Sympathetic Nervous System” and “The Fallacy of the Obsonic Index,” should be dissolved into his chemical elements with no personal or spiritual residue whatever. And yet the Professor shrugged his huge shoulders, shook his massive head and accepted the inevitable. Every fresh message was worse than the last, and, finally, there was an ominous silence. Challenger went down once to his young friend’s lodging in Gower Street. It was a racking experience, and he did not repeat it. The muscular cramps, which are characteristic of the complaint were tying the sufferer into knots, and he was biting his lips to shut down the screams which might have relieved his agony at the expense of his manhood. He seized his mentor by the hand as a drowning man seizes a plank.