Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/309

 with him as he would have been with Leora, with his own self.

"I'm sorry you think I don't know anything," he raged, and departed with the finest dramatic violence. He slammed into his own laboratory, felt freed, then wretched. Without volition, like a drunken man, he stormed to Wickett's room, protesting, "I suppose you're right. My physical chemistry is nix, and my math rotten. What am I going to do—what am I going to do?"

The embarrassed barbarian grumbled, "Well, for Pete's sake, Slim, don't worry. The old man and I were just egging you on. Fact is, he's tickled to death about the careful way you're starting in. About the math—probably you're better off than the Holy Wren and Tubbs right now; you've forgotten all the math you ever knew, and they never knew any. Gosh all fishhooks! Science is supposed to mean Knowledge—from the Greek, a handsome language spoken by the good old booze-hoisting Helleens—and the way most of the science boys resent having to stop writing little jeweled papers or giving teas and sweat at getting some knowledge certainly does make me a grand booster for the human race. My own math isn't any too good, Slim, but if you'd like to have me come around evenings and tutor you— Free, I mean!"

Thus began the friendship between Martin and Terry Wickett; thus began a change in Martin's life whereby he gave up three or four hours of wholesome sleep each night to grind over matters which every one is assumed to know, and almost every one does not know.

He took up algebra; found that he had forgotten most of it; cursed over the competition of the indefatigable A and the indolent B who walk from Y to Z; hired a Columbia tutor; and finished the subject, with a spurt of something like interest in regard to quadratic equations, in six weeks while Leora listened, watched, waited, made sandwiches, and laughed at the tutor's jokes.

By the eng of his first nine months at McGurk, Martin had reviewed trigonometry and analytic geometry and he was finding differential calculus romantic. But he made the mistake of telling Terry Wickett how much he knew.

Terry croaked, "Don't trust math too much, son," and he so confused him with references to the thermo-dynamical derivation of the mass action law, and to the oxidation reduction