“You have had rough luck, Berkeley.  I don’t wonder that you are miserable.  I am more sorry than I can tell you.”

“Thank you,” I said.  “It’s exceedingly good of you to listen so patiently, but it’s a shame for me to pester you with my sentimental troubles.”

“Now, Berkeley, you don’t think that, and I hope you don’t think that I do.  We should be bad biologists and worse physicians if we should under-estimate the importance of that which is Nature’s chiefest care.  The one salient biological truth is the paramount importance of sex; and we are deaf and blind if we do not hear and see it in everything that lives when we look abroad upon the world; when we listen to the spring song of the birds, or when we consider the lilies of the field.  And as is man to the lower organisms, so is human love to their merely reflex manifestations of sex.  I will maintain, and you will agree with me, I know, that the love of a serious and honourable man for a woman who is worthy of him is the most momentous of all human affairs.  It is the foundation of social life, and its failure is a serious calamity, not only to those whose lives may be thereby spoilt, but to society at large.”

“It’s a serious enough matter for the parties concerned,” I agreed; “but that is no reason why they should bore their friends.”

“But they don’t.  Friends should help one another and think it a privilege.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t mind coming to you for help, knowing you as I do.  But no one can help a poor devil in a case like this—­and certainly not a medical jurist.”

“Oh, come, Berkeley!” he protested, “don’t rate us too low.  The humblest of creatures has its uses—­’even the little pismire,’ you know, as Isaak Walton tells us.  Why, I have got substantial help from a stamp-collector.  And then reflect upon the motor-scorcher and the earthworm and the blow-fly.  All these lowly creatures play their parts in the scheme of Nature; and shall we cast out the medical jurist as nothing worth?”

I laughed dejectedly at my teacher’s genial irony.

“What I meant,” said I, “was that there is nothing to be done but wait—­perhaps for ever.  I don’t know why she isn’t able to marry me, and I mustn’t ask her.  She can’t be married already.”

“Certainly not.  She told you explicitly that there was no man in the case.”

“Exactly.  And I can think of no other valid reason, excepting that she doesn’t care enough for me.  That would be a perfectly sound reason, but then it would only be a temporary one, not the insuperable obstacle that she assumes to exist, especially as we really got on excellently together.  I hope it isn’t some confounded perverse feminine scruple.  I don’t see how it could be; but women are most frightfully tortuous and wrong-headed at times.”

“I don’t see,” said Thorndyke, “why we should cast about for perversely abnormal motives when there is a perfectly reasonable explanation staring us in the face.”