Page:The Professor's House - Willa Cather.pdf/152

 “Strickly speaking, of course, it wasn’t. The idea was Outland’s. He benefited by my criticism, and I often helped him with his experiments. He never acquired a nice laboratory technic. He would fail repeatedly in some perfectly sound experiment because of careless procedure.”

“Do you think he would have arrived at his results without your help?”

Dr. Crane was clenching the paper-knife with both hands. “That I cannot say. He was impatient. He might have got discouraged and turned to something else. He would have been much slower in getting his results, at any rate. His conception was right, but very delicate manipulation was necessary, and he was a careless experimentor.”

St. Peter felt that this was becoming nothing less than cross-examination. He tried to change the tone of it.

“I want to see you get recognition and compensation for whatever part you had in his experiments, if there’s any way to get it. But you’ve been neglectful, Crane. You haven’t taken the proper steps. Why in the world didn’t you have some understanding with Tom when he was getting his patent? You knew all about it.”

“It didn’t occur to me then. We’d finished the experiments, and I put them out of my mind. I was trying to concentrate on my own work. His results