"Good God, Rose!" he shouted. "Can't you take my word for it and let it
alone? I'm not ill, nor frightened, nor broken-hearted. I don't need to
be comforted nor encouraged. I'm in an intellectual quandary. For the
next three hours, or six, or however long it takes, I want my mind to
run cold and smooth. I've got to be tight and strained. That's the way
the job's done. You can't solve an intellectual problem by having your
hand held, or your eyes kissed, or anything like that. Now, for God's
sake, child, run along and let me forget you ever existed, for a while!"

And he ground his teeth over an impulse that all but got the better of
him, after she'd shut the door, to follow her out into the corridor and
pull her up in his arms and kiss her face all over, and to consign the
Law and the Prophets both, to the devil.




CHAPTER IV

LONG CIRCUITS AND SHORT


James Randolph was a native Chicagoan, but his father, an intelligent
and prosperous physician, with a general practise in one of the northern
suburbs, afterward annexed to the city, did not belong to the old
before-the-fire aristocracy that Rodney and Frederica, and Martin
Whitney, the Crawfords and Violet Williamson were born into. The medical
tradition carried itself along to the third generation, when James made
a profession of it, and in him, it flowered really into genius. From the