Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/409

 Miss Gwilliam looked after him with an expression which said that the least people could do was to learn some manners.

With the heat and the threat of hurricanes, there were few first-class passengers on the St. Buryan, and most of these did not count, because they were not jolly, decent Yankee tourists but merely South Americans. As tourists do when their minds have been broadened and enriched by travel, when they return to New Jersey or Wisconsin with the credit of having spent a whole six months in the West Indies and South America, the respectable remnant studied one another fastidiously, and noted the slim pale man who seemed so restless, who all day trudged round the deck, who after midnight was seen standing by himself at the rail.

"That guy looks awful' restless to me!" said Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble of Detroit to the charming Mrs. Dawson of Memphis, and she answered, with the wit which made her so popular wherever she went, "Yes, don't he. I reckon he must be in love!"

"Oh, I know him!" said Miss Gwilliam. "He and his wife were on the St. Buryan when I came down. She's in New York now. He's some kind of a doctor—not awful' successful I don't believe. Just between ourselves, I don't think much of him or of her either. They sat and looked stupid all the way down."

Martin was itching to get his fingers on his test-tubes. He knew, as once he had guessed, that he hated administration and Large Affairs.

As he tramped the deck, his head cleared and he was himself. Angrily he pictured the critics who would soon be pecking at whatever final report he might make. For a time he hated the criticism of his fellow laboratory-grinds as he had hated their competition; he hated the need of forever looking over his shoulder at pursuers. But on a night when he stood at the rail for hours, he admitted that he was afraid of their criticism, and afraid because his experiment had so many loopholes. He hurled overboard all the polemics with which he had