one is always progressing beyond the best. He put his arm in mine
and whispered in my ear, as if it were the apocalypse: 'Never
trust a God that you can't improve on.'"

"What can he have meant?" said the atheist, with all his logic
awake. "Obviously one should not trust any God that one can
improve on."

"It is the way he talks," said MacIan, almost indifferently; "but
he says rummier things than that. He says that a man's doctor
ought to decide what woman he marries; and he says that children
ought not to be brought up by their parents, because a physical
partiality will then distort the judgement of the educator."

"Oh, dear!" said Turnbull, laughing, "you have certainly come
across a pretty bad case, and incidentally proved your own. I
suppose some men do lose their wits through science as through
love and other good things."

"And he says," went on MacIan, monotonously, "that he cannot see
why anyone should suppose that a triangle is a three-sided
figure. He says that on some higher plane----"

Turnbull leapt to his feet as by an electric shock. "I never
could have believed," he cried, "that you had humour enough to
tell a lie. You've gone a bit too far, old man, with your little
joke. Even in a lunatic asylum there can't be anybody who, having
thought about the matter, thinks that a triangle has not got
three sides. If he exists he must be a new era in human
psychology. But he doesn't exist."