Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/445

 laboratory he had ever seen—white-tile floor and enameled brick walls, ice-box and incubator, glassware and stains and microscope, a perfect constant-temperature bath—and a technician, trained in Lister and Rockefeller, who had his bedroom behind the laboratory and who announced his readiness to serve Dr. Arrowsmith day or night.

"There!" sang Joyce. "Now when you simply must work evenings, you won't have to go clear down to Liberty Street. You can duplicate your cultures, or whatever you call 'em. If you're bored at dinner—all right! You can slip out here afterward, and work as late as ever you want. Is— Sweet, is it all right? Have I done it right? I tried so hard—I got the best men I could—"

While his lips were against hers he brooded, "To have done this for me! And to be so humble And now, curse it, I'll never be able to get away by myself!"

She so joyfully demanded his finding some fault that, to give her the novel pleasure of being meek, he suggested that the centrifuge was inadequate.

"You wait, my man!" she crowed.

Two evenings after, when they had returned from the opera, she led him to the cement-floored garage beneath his new laboratory, and in a corner, ready to be set up, was a second-hand but adequate centrifuge, a most adequate centrifuge, the masterpiece of the great firm of Berkeley-Saunders—in fact none other than Gladys, whose dismissal from McGurk for her sluttish ways had stirred Martin and Terry to go out and get bountifully drunk.

It was less easy for him, this time, to be grateful, but he worked at it.

Through both the economico-literary and the Rolls-Royce sections of Joyce's set the rumor panted that there was a new diversion in an exhausted world—going out to Martin's laboratory and watching him work, and being ever so silent and reverent, except perhaps when Joyce murmured, "Isn't he adorable the way he teaches his darling bacteria to say 'Pretty Polly'!" or when Latham Ireland convulsed them by arguing that scientists had no sense of humor, or Sammy de Lembre burst out in his marvelous burlesque of jazz: