He had started the machine.  So magical was the effect on the little audience that I am tempted to repeat what I had already heard, but had not myself yet been able to explain: 

“How is she to-day?”

“Not much changed—­perhaps not so well.”

“It’s all right, though.  That is natural.  It is working well.  I think you might increase the dose one tablet.”

“You’re sure it is all right?”

“Oh, positively—­it has been done in Europe.”

“I hope so.  It must be a boy—­and an Atherton.”

“Never fear.”

No one moved a muscle.  If there was anyone in the room guilty of playing on the feelings and the health of an unfortunate woman, that person must have had superb control of his own feelings.

“As you know,” resumed Kennedy thoughtfully, “there are and have been many theories of sex control.  One of the latest, but by no means the only one, is that it can be done by use of the extracts of various glands administered to the mother.  I do not know with what scientific authority it was stated, but I do know that some one has recently said that adrenalin, derived from the suprarenal glands, induces boys to develop—­cholin, from the bile of the liver, girls.  It makes no difference—­in this case.  There may have been a show of science.  But it was to cover up a crime.  Some one has been administering to Eugenia Atherton tablets of thyroid extract—­ostensibly to aid her in fulfilling the dearest ambition of her soul—­to become the mother of a new line of Athertons which might bear the same relation to the future of the country as the great family of the Edwards mothered by Elizabeth Tuttle.”

He was bending over the two phonograph cylinders now, rapidly comparing the new one which he had made and that which he had just allowed to reel off its astounding revelation.

“When a voice speaks into a phonograph,” he said, half to himself, “its modulations received on the diaphragm are written by a needle point upon the surface of a cylinder or disk in a series of fine waving or zigzag lines of infinitely varying depth or breadth.  Dr. Marage and others have been able to distinguish vocal sounds by the naked eye on phonograph records.  Mr. Edison has studied them with the microscope in his world-wide search for the perfect voice.

“In fact, now it is possible to identify voices by the records they make, to get at the precise meaning of each slightest variation of the lines with mathematical accuracy.  They can no more be falsified than handwriting can be forged so that modern science cannot detect it or than typewriting can be concealed and attributed to another machine.  The voice is like a finger print, a portrait parle—­unescapable.”

He glanced up, then back again.  “This microscope shows me,” he said, “that the voices on that cylinder you heard are identical with two on this record which I have just made in this room.”