Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/224

 theories of bidding at bridge. But she never nagged. To have nagged would have been to admit that there were persons who did not acknowledge her sovereignty. She merely gave orders, brief, humorous, and introduced by a strident "Now don't be silly," and she expected that to settle the matter.

Martin groaned, "Oh, Lord, between Pickerbaugh and Irve, it's easier to become a respectable member of society than to go on fighting."

But Watters and Pickerbaugh were not so great a compulsion to respectability as the charms of finding himself listened to in Nautilus as he never had been in Wheatsylvania, and of finding himself admired by Orchid.

He had been seeking a precipitation test for the diagnosis of syphilis which should be quicker and simpler than the Wassermann. His slackened fingers and rusty mind were becoming used to the laboratory and to passionate hypotheses when he was dragged away to help Pickerbaugh in securing publicity. He was coaxed into making his first speech: an address on "What the Laboratory Teaches about Epidemics" for the Sunday Afternoon Free Lecture Course of the Star of Hope Universalist Church.

He was flustered when he tried to prepare his notes, and on the morning of the affair he was chill as he remembered the dreadful thing he would do this day, but he was desperate with embarrassment when he came up to the Star of Hope Church.

People were crowding in; mature, responsible people. He quaked, "They're coming to hear me, and I haven't got a darn' thing to say to 'em!" It made him feel the more ridiculous that they who presumably wished to listen to him should not be aware of him, and that the usher, profusely shaking hands at the Byzantine portal, should bluster, "You'll find plenty room right up the side aisles, young man."

"I'm the speaker for the afternoon."

"Oh, oh, yes, oh, yes, Doctor. Right round to the Bevis Street entrance, if you please, Doctor."

In the parlors he was unctuously received by the pastor and a committee of three, wearing morning clothes and a manner of Christian intellectuality.

They held his hand in turn, they brought up rustling women