Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/454

 He drove up to Birdies' Rest in a bob-sled. Terry was chopping wood, in a mess of chip-littered snow.

"Hello, Terry. Come for keeps."

"Fine, "Slim. Say, there's a lot of dishes in the shack need washing."

He had become soft. To dress in the cold shanty and to wash in icy water was agony; to tramp for three hours through fluffy snow exhausted him. But the rapture of being allowed to work twenty-four hours a day without leaving an experiment at its juiciest moment to creep home for dinner, of plunging with Terry into arguments as cryptic as theology and furious as the indignation of a drunken man, carried him along, and he felt himself growing sinewy. Often he meditated on yielding to Joyce so far as to allow her to build a better laboratory for them, and more civilized quarters.

With only one servant, though, or two at the very most, and just a simple decent bathroom—

She had written, "You have been thoroughly beastly, and any attempt at reconciliation, if that is possible now, which I rather doubt, must come from you."

He answered, describing the ringing winter woods and not mentioning the platform word Reconciliation.

They wanted to study further the exact mechanism of the action of their quinine derivatives. This was difficult with the mice which Terry had contrived to use instead of monkeys, because of their size. Martin had brought with him strains of Bacillus leptsepticus, which causes a pleuro-pneumonia in rabbits, and their first labor was to discover whether their original compound was effective against this bacillus as well as against pneumococcus. Profanely they found that it was not; profanely and patiently they trudged into an infinitely complicated search for a compound that should be.

They earned their living by preparing sera which rather grudgingly they sold to physicians of whose honesty they were certain, abruptly refusing the popular drug-vendors. They thus received surprisingly large sums, and among all clever