Professor, with an air of toleration. "Protoplasm
may prove to be the physical basis of love as well as
of life."

"How inflexible you are!" she exclaimed; "you
would draw love down to the level of physics."

"Or draw physics up to the level of love."

"Come, that is much better," she cried, with her
sympathetic laugh. "That is really very pretty, and
puts science in quite a delightful light."

Her eyes sparkled, and she tossed her chin with
the pretty, wilful air of a woman who is mistress of
the situation.

"I have reason to believe," said the Professor,
"that my position here will prove to be only a
stepping-stone to some wider scene of scientific
activity. Yet, even here, my chair brings me in some
fifteen hundred pounds a year, which is supplemented
by a few hundreds from my books. I should therefore
be in a position to provide you with those comforts
to which you are accustomed. So much for my
pecuniary position. As to my constitution, it has
always been sound. I have never suffered from any
illness in my life, save fleeting attacks of
cephalalgia, the result of too prolonged a
stimulation of the centres of cerebration. My father