At commencement time Marvin’s father happened to be in South America, but his mother came on to New Haven, where she met not only Mrs. Hogg and Jimmy, but also Gratia. Her son surprised her by refusing to take a vacation. She therefore returned with him to New York, and saw him settled.

Before she left him she had learned, in the gentle way of mothers, what he had said to Kate Coggeshall, and had given him her check that he might buy a car. She knew him for what he was, masculine, able, and intermittent, and saw that friendship with Gratia would go far to keep him straight.

But he did not soon spend the check. He plunged into the study of carbon, especially the forms that need to be more perfectly carbonized to yield smokeless fuel.

Great is carbon, and deep as the shining sea, and a man may plunge into it without going far. It is only the sixth chapter of electricity, but it holds the patterns of human history. It is the most remarkable of all the elements that unite to make a human body.

To conceive of some bodily actions as electric is not difficult. When you lose your temper and hit a man, the very crack of the bones sounds like a crack of lightning. When you discharge a kiss that you never meant to discharge, it seems natural to blame your battery. But what divine fingers could shape the lightning into a steady brain and quiet glands?

Yet for a while this miracle was happening in Marvin. His limbs held still while he thought. His glands stored up their treasures unnoticed, or sent them secretly through his blood.

How could he think of Gratia when he was swimming in low-temperature coal-tar, or convincing himself that coal cannot be turned into water gas at the mine? Gratia was sweet—men cannot speak of girls without using that carbonic word—but he had not time to smell even the jasmine of coal-tar, much less its orange blossoms.

What was worse, he found it hard to stick to carbon. His mind kept running ahead. As the avaricious are fascinated by crystals of carbon, so he was fascinated by crystals of ordinary calcite. He could not keep away from a certain laboratory to which new crystal spectrometers were being added for the study of atomic structure.

Grein, the young dean and professor of radiochemistry, soon found him there, and a real friendship sprang up. Grein found that Marvin not only knew about Moseley but had read Harkins’s June article proposing a definite hydrogen-helium theory for the constitution of all atoms. And Marvin seemed to like a man for being overworked and irritable.

In Marvin’s room there was a telephone, and one August morning it rang with the sudden pressure of Grein’s voice against its carbon granules.

“Come over here, prepared for a shock.”

Marvin ran to the laboratory, and Grein handed him a cable message:

Lieutenant Moseley shot through head instantly killed tenth Suvla Bay while telephoning as signal officer.

The look on Marvin’s face was ghastly. At last he managed to ejaculate, “Only twenty-seven!”

“Yes,” muttered Grein, “and any one of his frequencies was worth more to England than the whole damned British army!”

Marvin’s unconscious fingers closed like clenching tools as he dully uttered one word:

“Lead!”

“Exactly. Lead driven through the one brain that really understood lead. Better drop your fuels and study lead.”

“No. I’m not in that class.”

“Who knows what class you’re in? I’m no Boltwood, and I’m too busy to pace you, but I’ll see that you have some salts and minerals to work with, and you can have a corner to yourself for the rest of the year.”