hristian Science more or less
openly, but they did not esteem it necessary to proselyte. Political
creeds were but jocularly discussed. To advocate any special belief
was to prick one's self down a bore, although some of those in the
strictly university circles did at times become troublesomely learned
in conversation. However, this was esteemed "old fogy-ism" by the
younger men like Serviss, who alluded to "the days of the professional
monologue" with smiling contempt. Conversation with them was a means
of diversion, not of enlightenment as to any special subject.

Into these circles a thorough-going spiritualist never penetrated. To
tell the truth, these modernists did not permit the hereafter to awe
or affright them. Some of them went to church, but they did so calmly,
patiently, as to a decorous function, and some may at times have
prayed, through the medium of printed supplication, but, generally
speaking, they had reached a sort of philosophic indifference as to
the one-time burning question of heaven or hell. So far from
acquiescing in the dictum that morality was but filthy rags, they
esteemed good deeds and clean thoughts higher than any religion
whatsoever.

Mrs. Rice expressed the convictions of many of her associates by
saying, humorously: "No, I don't want to be saved. I'm not lost. I
don't know as I care for immortality. Forever is a long time--I might
get bored; anyhow, the future must take care of itself."

In all the drawing-rooms of his friends, Morton Serviss was a most
welcome guest. His frank, boyish ways, his careless dress, his freedom
from cant, his essential good-fellowship deceived the most of his
acquaintances into thinking him a mere dabbler in science, a man of
wealth amusing himself; but Weissmann, who was qualified to know,
said: "He has persistency, concentration, a keen mind, a clear eye,
and a _voonderful_ physique."

He belonged, moreover, to the men of imagination, not to those who
write books or poems, but to those who tunnel mountains, build vast
bridges, invent new motors, and play with electrical currents as if
they were ribbons. The novelist basing himself on what he knows of
human nature projects himself into the unknown, just as the scientist
who stands on the discoveries of those before him feels out into the
darkness for new stars, new forces. And yet as Clarke and his party
indignantly declared, "both novelist and scientist ignore the question
most vital to us all--the