before the country had become wholesome and sterile, and the Brevoort was a tumult of French uniforms, caviar, Louis, dangling neckties, Nuits St. Georges, illustrators, Grand Marnier, British Intelligence officers, brokers, conversation, and Martell, V.O.
"It's a fine crazy bunch," said Martin. "Do you realize we can stop being respectable now? Irving Watters isn't watching us, or Angus! Would we be too insane if we had a bottle of champagne?"
He awoke next day to fret that there must be a trick somewhere, as there had been in Nautilus, in Chicago. But as he set to work he seemed to be in a perfect world. The Institute deftly provided all the material and facilities he could desire—animals, incubators, glassware, cultures, media—and he had a thoroughly trained technician—"garçon" they called him at the Institute. He really was let alone; he really was encouraged to do individual work; he really was associated with men who thought not in terms of poetic posters or of two-thousand-dollar operations but of colloids and sporulation and electrons, and of the laws and energies which governed them.
On his first day there came to greet him the head of the Department of Physiology, Dr. Rippleton Holabird.
Holabird seemed, though Martin had found his name starred in physiological journals, too young and too handsome to be the head of a department: a tall, slim, easy man with a trim mustache. Martin had been reared in the school of Clif Clawson; he had not realized, till he heard Dr. Holabird's quick greeting, that a man's voice may be charming without effeminacy.
Holabird guided him through the two floors of the Institute, and Martin beheld all the wonders of which he had ever dreamed. If it was not so large, McGurk ranked in equipment with Rockefeller, Pasteur, McCormick, Lister. Martin saw rooms for sterilizing glass and preparing media, for glass-blowing, for the polariscope and the spectroscope, and a steel-and-cement-walled combustion-chamber. He saw a museum of pathology and bacteriology to which he longed to add. There was a department of publications, whence were issued the Institute reports, and the American Journal of Geographic Pathology, edited by the Director, Dr. Tubbs; there was a room for photography, a glorious library, an aquarium for the
