"I don't understand," said Norman, eying the bottled worms curiously.

"Oh, it's simply the demonstration that life is a mere chemical
process----"

Norman had ceased to listen. The girl was moving toward the door by
which they had entered--was in the doorway--was gone! He stood in an
attitude of attention; Hallowell talked on and on, passing from one
thing to another, forgetting his caller and himself, thinking only of
the subject, the beloved science, that has brought into the modern world
a type of men like those who haunted the deserts and mountain caves in
the days when Rome was falling to pieces. With those saintly hermits of
the Dark Ages religion was the all-absorbing subject. And seeking their
own salvation was the goal upon which their ardent eyes were necessarily
bent. With these modern devotees, science--the search for the truth
about the world in which they live--is their religion; and their goal
is the redemption of the world. They are resolved--step by step, each
worker contributing his mite of discovery--to transform the world from a
hell of discomfort and pain and death to a heaven where men and women,
free and enlightened and perhaps immortal, shall live in happiness. They
even dream that perhaps this race of gods shall learn to construct the
means to take them to another and younger planet, when this Earth has
become too old and too cold and too nakedly clad in atmosphere properly
to sustain life.

From time to time Norman caught a few words of what Hallowell
said--words that made him respect the intelligence that had uttered
them. But he neither cared nor dared to listen. He refused to be
deflected from his one purpose. When he was as old as Hallowell, it
would be time to think of these matters. When he had snatched the things