Lanfear, of course, had been struck from the first by his gift of accurate observation, and by the fact that his eagerness to learn was offset by his reluctance to conclude.  I remember Lanfear’s telling me that he had never known a lad of Dredge’s age who gave such promise of uniting an aptitude for general ideas with the plodding patience of the accumulator of facts.  Of course when Lanfear talked like that of a young biologist his fate was sealed.  There could be no question of Dredge’s going back to “teach school” at East Lethe.  He must take a course in biology at Columbia, spend his vacations at the Wood’s Holl laboratory, and then, if possible, go to Germany for a year or two.

All this meant his virtual adoption by the Lanfears.  Most of Lanfear’s fortune went in helping young students to a start, and he devoted his heaviest subsidies to Dredge.

“Dredge will be my biggest dividend—­you’ll see!” he used to say, in the chrysalis days when poor Galen was known to the world of science only as a perpetual slouching presence in Mrs. Lanfear’s drawing-room.  And Dredge, it must be said, took his obligations simply, with that kind of personal dignity, and quiet sense of his own worth, which in such cases saves the beneficiary from abjectness.  He seemed to trust himself as fully as Lanfear trusted him.

The comic part of it was that his only idea of making what is known as “a return” was to devote himself to the Professor’s family.  When I hear pretty women lamenting that they can’t coax Professor Dredge out of his laboratory I remember Mabel Lanfear’s cry to me:  “If Galen would only keep away!” When Mabel fell on the ice and broke her leg, Galen walked seven miles in a blizzard to get a surgeon; but if he did her this service one day in the year, he bored her by being in the way for the other three hundred and sixty-four.  One would have imagined at that time that he thought his perpetual presence the greatest gift he could bestow; for, except on the occasion of his fetching the surgeon, I don’t remember his taking any other way of expressing his gratitude.

In love with Mabel?  Not a bit!  But the queer thing was that he did have a passion in those days—­a blind, hopeless passion for Mrs. Lanfear!  Yes:  I know what I’m saying.  I mean Mrs. Lanfear, the Professor’s wife, poor Mrs. Lanfear, with her tight hair and her loose figure, her blameless brow and earnest eye-glasses, and her perpetual attitude of mild misapprehension.  I can see Dredge cowering, long and many-jointed, in a diminutive drawing-room chair, one square-toed shoe coiled round an exposed ankle, his knees clasped in a knot of red knuckles, and his spectacles perpetually seeking Mrs. Lanfear’s eye-glasses.  I never knew if the poor lady was aware of the sentiment she inspired, but her children observed it, and it provoked them to irreverent mirth.  Galen was the predestined butt of Mabel and Archie; and secure in their mother’s