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 exactly like Dr. Pickerbaugh!" Leora looked proud, and so did her husband.

"I'm glad you're free from this socialistic clap-trap of Pickerbaugh's," said Tredgold.

The assumption roused something sturdy and defensive in Martin:

"Oh, I don't care a hang how socialistic he is—whatever that means. Don't know anything about socialism. But since I've gone and given an imitation of him—I suppose it was probably disloyal—I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts. But mind you, Tredgold, it's partly the fault of people like your Manufacturers' Association. You encourage him to rant. I'm a laboratory man—or rather, I sometimes wish I were. I like to deal with exact figures."

"So do I. I was keen on mathematics in Williams," said Tredgold.

Instantly Martin and he were off on education, damning the universities for turning out graduates like sausages. Martin found himself becoming confidential about "variables," and Tredgold proclaimed that he had not wanted to take up the ancestral factory, but to specialize in astronomy.

Leora was confessing to the friendly Mrs. Tredgold how cautiously the wife of an assistant director has to economize, and with that caressing voice of hers Mrs. Tredgold comforted, "I know. I was horribly hard-up after Dad died. Have you tried the little Swedish dressmaker on Crimmins Street, two nae from the Catholic church? She's awfully clever, and so cheap."

Martin had found, for the first time since marriage, a house in which he was altogether happy; Leora had found, in a woman with the easy smartness which she had always feared and hated, the first woman to whom she could talk of God and the price of toweling. They came out from themselves and were not laughed at.

It was at midnight, when the charms of bacteriology and toweling were becoming pallid, that outside the house sounded a whooping, wheezing motor horn, and in lumbered a ruddy fat man who was introduced as Mr. Schlemihl, president of the Cornbelt Insurance Company of Nautilus.

Even more than Clay Tredgold was he a leader of the Ashford Grove aristocracy, but, while he stood like an invading