Science moves at an extraordinarily uneven gait. We laymen follow as best we can. I don’t pretend to make a history of medical discoveries, and poor Dorrien’s theories may have been exploded long since. The public knows only vain gossip of the laboratory’s “expectations” until the serum is born. I don’t even know how much he contributed, but I do know that at one moment terror-stricken multitudes were looking to him for help. He had been the last man, in college days, who seemed marked out for the work of discovery: easy-going, delighting in musical comedy, to which he listened with the least subtle laugh in the world. He married, at about thirty, the very worldly daughter of a public-spirited American family. There wasn’t anything for two centuries, from witch-burning to slave-rescuing, the Hewells hadn’t had their fingers in. The Hewell spinsters have always headed intense and short-lived leagues for the suppression of unsuspected evils or the maintenance of out-dated ideals. The Hewell men are bred to reform as the English race-horse is bred to the turf. Their marriages are apt to be bloodlessly tragic. Agatha Hewell--that is, Agatha Dorrien--was a special case, very worldly, as I’ve said. She didn’t care for money, but she cared for fame, which meant, she had the sense to see, marrying a clever man. She made herself rather absurd, when she came out, by dashing at celebrities; but she also made herself popular with her contemporaries by letting the dancing men alone. When she married Dorrien, she seemed likely to eat her cake and have it, too; for he was young and good-looking, and there could be by that time no question about his ability. She and Dorrien both danced a good deal in the earlier years of their marriage. The serious Hewells approved of him none the less, for he had interested himself pretty constantly, since his Johns Hopkins days, in tuberculosis, which suited their public spirit admirably. The Hewells found campaigns rather nasty work, but they loved legislation, and Dorrien was always appearing passionately before boards and commissions, and getting “machine” mayors to lift the submerged tenth into so many cubic feet of air. He had always a natural leaning, though, it was interesting to recall later, to the maladies of immigrants; and Ellis Island had more than once summoned him. He chafed a little, in the end, under the vocabularies of boards and commissions, and I once heard him say that he’d be damned if he’d lecture again to any woman’s club, no matter if they built a sanatorium the next minute. He was flat against woman suffrage, and said so, but the Hewell aunts forgave him on account of his tuberculosis activity. They called it a crusade. Agatha said nothing.