Still, it was necessary that the two men see something of each other.
Hallowell discovered nothing about Norman, not enough about his personal
appearance to have recognized him in the street far enough away from the
laboratory to dissociate the two ideas. Human beings--except his
daughter--did not interest Hallowell; and his feeling for her was
somewhat in the nature of an abstraction. Norman, on the other hand, was
intensely interested in human beings; indeed, he was interested in
little else. He was always thrusting through surfaces, probing into
minds and souls. He sought thoroughly to understand the living machines
he used in furthering his ambitions and desires. So it was not long
before he learned much about old Newton Hallowell--and began to admire
him--and with a man of Norman's temperament to admire is to like.

He had assumed at the outset that the scientist was more or less the
crank. He had not talked with him many times before he discovered that,
far from being in any respect a crank, he was a most able and
well-balanced mentality--a genius. The day came when, Dorothy not having
returned from a shopping tour, he lingered in the laboratory talking
with the father, or, rather, listening while the man of great ideas
unfolded to him conceptions of the world that set his imagination to
soaring.

Most of us see but dimly beyond the ends of our noses, and visualize
what lies within our range of sight most imperfectly. We know little
about ourselves, less about others. We fancy that the world and the
human race always have been about as they now are, and always will be.
History reads to us like a fairy tale, to which we give conventional
acceptance as truth. As to the future, we can conceive nothing but the
continuation of just what we see about us in the present. Norman,
practical man though he was, living in and for the present, had yet an