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He wuz dretful excited, so I hearn, about Metilda's case thought it wuz highly incumbient on the meetin' house to have her made a example of, so's to try to abolish such wicked doin's as snickerin' out in meetin'. "I wonder how he would have liked it to have had Charley Lanfear's mother set on him?
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.
"I tell you what," said Basset, "who do you think struck me the other night?" "Why, what could it be but Lanfear's ghost?" "Don't talk to me about sperits; whose afraid o' them? But tell us one thing, did you see Holden when you looked into the window!" "What makes you ask?" said the cautious Tom, "supposing I did, or supposing I didn't?" "'Cause I know you didn't.
If not always perceptible to the untrained eye, in Lanfear's sight it never deviated, and the great man began to associate Dredge with his work, and to lean on him more and more. Lanfear's health was already failing, and in my confidential talks with him I saw how he counted on Galen Dredge to continue and amplify his doctrine.
It was about this time that the crowning satisfaction of Lanfear's career came to him: I mean, of course, John Weyman's gift to Columbia of the Lanfear Laboratory, and the founding, in connection with it, of a chair of Experimental Evolution. Weyman had always taken an interest in Lanfear's work, but no one had supposed that his interest would express itself so magnificently.
He developed slowly, as the scientific mind generally does, and was still adrift about himself and his tendencies when Archie took him down to Buzzard's Bay. But he had read Lanfear's "Utility and Variation," and had always been a patient and curious observer of nature. And his first meeting with Lanfear explained him to himself.
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.
His remarkable paper on Sexual Dimorphism had been translated into several languages, and a furious polemic had broken out over it. When a young fellow can get the big men fighting over him his future is pretty well assured. But Dredge was only thirty-four, and some people seemed to feel that there was a kind of deflected nepotism in Lanfear's choice.
She was consciously an invalid of some sort, for she spoke of getting well under sunsets like that which had now waned, but what sort of invalid was she? Lanfear's question persisted through the night, and it helped, with the coughing in the next room, to make a bad night for him. None of the hotels in San Remo receive consumptive patients, but none are without somewhere a bronchial cough.
He took the place in front, and left her to Lanfear's care, with the trust which was the physician's right, and with a sense of the girl's dependence in which she was still a child to him. They did not speak till well on the way home. Then the father leaned forward and whispered huskily: "Do you think she's as strong as she was?" Lanfear waited, as if thinking the facts over.
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