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 CHAPTER XIV

ROFESSOR CHALLENGER was not a man who made friends easily. In order to be his friend you had also to be his dependent. He did not admit of equals. But as a patron he was superb. With his Jovian air, his colossal condescension, his amused smile, his general suggestion of the god de¬ scending to the mortal, he could be quite overpowering in his amiability. But he needed certain qualities in return. Stupidity disgusted him. Physical ugliness alienated him. Independence repulsed him. He coveted the man whom all the world would admire, but who in turn would admire the superman above him. Such a man was Dr. Ross Scotton, and for this reason he had been Challenger’s favourite pupil.

And now he was sick unto death. Dr. Atkinson of St. Mary’s, who has already played some minor part in this record, was attending him, and his reports were increasingly depressing. The illness was that dread disease, disseminated sclerosis, and Challenger was aware that Atkinson was no alarmist when he said that a cure was a most remote and unlikely possibility.

It seemed a terrible instance of the unreasonable nature of things that a young man of science, capable before he reached his prime of two such works as “ The Embryology of the Sympathetic Nervous System” and “The Fallacy of the Obsonic Index,” 230