"We'll make a psychologist of you yet," she said. "Psychologist? Why? You're joking." "No. It's not a joke. You'll _like_ psychology, darling. You can't go on playing polo forever, you know." Darling! What was he getting into? Old man Gilby was four-goal at sixty, wasn't he? Good God, was he hooked into marriage at twenty-three? Was she married already? Did she know or care whether he was? Had she been promiscuous? Would she continue to be? He'd never know; that was the one thing you never asked; your only comfort, if you needed comfort, was that she could never dream of asking you. What went on here? Let me out! It went through his mind in a single panicky flash and then he said: "The hell with it," and kissed her again. She wanted to know: "The hell with what, darling?" "Everything. Tell me about psychology. I can't go on playing polo forever." It was an hour before she got around to telling him about psychology: "The neglect has been criminal--and inexplicable. For about a century it's been _assumed_ that psychology is a dead fallacy. Why?" "All right," he said amiably, playing with a lock of her hair. "Why?" "Lieberman," she said. "Lieberman of Johns-Hopkins. He was one of the old-line topological psychology men--don't let the lingo throw you, Charles; it's just the name of a system. He wrote an attack on the _mengenlehre_ psychology school--point-sets of emotions, class-inclusions of reactions and so on. He blasted them to bits by proving that their constructs didn't correspond to the emotions and reactions of random-sampled populations. And then came the pay-off: he tried the same acid test on his _own_ school's constructs and found out that they didn't correspond either. It didn't frighten him; he was a scientist. He published, and then the jig was up. Everybody, from full professors to undergraduate students went down the roster of the schools of psychology and wrecked them so comprehensively that the field was as dead as palmistry in twenty years. The miracle is that it hadn't happened before. The flaws were so glaring! Textbooks of the older kind solemnly described syndromes, psychoses, neuroses that simply couldn't be found in the real world! And that's the way it was all the way down the line." "So where does that leave us?" Charles demanded. "Is it or isn't it a science?" "It is," she said simply. "Lieberman and his followers went too far. It became a kind of hysteria. The experimenters must have been too eager. They misread results, they misinterpreted statistics, they misunderstood the claims of a school and knocked down not its true claims but straw-man claims they had set up themselves." "But--_psychology_!" Charles protested, obscurely embarrassed at the thought that man's mind was subject to scientific study--not because he knew the first thing about it, but because _everybody_ knew psychology was phony.