As he poured out his passionate plea, a sense of injury, of disillusionment, overran the girl. She revolted from the touch of his head against her knee. "You must not talk to me that way--you belong to her." She pushed him away. "Get up. Go away from me. I hate you now." There was something so final, so convicting in her gesture of repulsion that the man's head dropped. He covered his face and uttered a groaning cry, and so lay silently sobbing, while she looked down at him--woman-grown in that instant. His passion moved her to pity, not to love, and she put him aside gently and left the room without further word. Her master, her highest earthly guide, had fallen from his lofty place and lay grovelling at her feet. This conception, vague but massive, oppressed her heart, and lay upon her brain like a leaden cap. At the moment she, too, despaired of life and knew not where to turn for aid. BOOK II I THE MODERNISTS The Bacteriologic Department of the Corlear Medical School stood at this time on one of the cross-streets of the old East Side, not far from Corlear Park. It was a large, old-fashioned brick building, worn of threshold, and as ugly in line as a livery barn. Its entrance was merely a gap in the wall, its windows rectangular openings to let in the light. Not one touch of color or grace, not one dignified line could be detected throughout its whole exterior. It was constructed for use, not ornament. Interiorly it was quite as utilitarian. Its halls, bare and cheerless, echoed to the tread and were repellent as those of a barracks. The visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the insolent servant of an indifferent hostess. It seemed the home of the mathematical, the mechanical, the material; but this was a mistake. It was a house of dreams. The right knock at one of those ugly doors would permit one to step into the presence of the most cheery, the most learned, the most imaginative of individuals--the man of germs, poet, dreamer, and experimentalist, absorbed in the pursuit of the unattainable, concerned with the ultimate structure of organic life, baffled, yet toiling on for love of his work, while the sick of the world believe in him as an angel of altruism.