I + 

Director Rippleton Holabird had also married money, and whenever his colleagues hinted that since his first ardent work in physiology he had done nothing but arrange a few nicely selected flowers on the tables hewn out by other men, it was a satisfaction to him to observe that these rotters came down to the Institute by subway, while he drove elegantly in his coupe. But now Arrowsmith, once the poorest of them all, came by limousine with a chauffeur who touched his hat, and Holabird’s coffee was salted. + 

There was a simplicity in Martin, but it cannot be said that he did not lick his lips when Holabird mooned at the chauffeur. + 

His triumph over Holabird was less than being able to entertain Angus Duer and his wife, on from Chicago; to introduce them to Director Holabird, to Salamon the king of surgeons, and to a medical baronet; and to have Angus gush, “Mart, do you mind my saying we’re all awfully proud of you? Rouncefield was speaking to me about it the other day. ‘It may be presumptuous,’ he said, ‘but I really feel that perhaps the training we tried to give Dr. Arrowsmith here in the Clinic did in some way contribute to his magnificent work in the West Indies and at McGurk.’ What a lovely woman your wife is, old man! Do you suppose she’d mind telling Mrs. Duer where she got that frock?” + 

Martin had heard about the superiority of poverty to luxury, but after the lunch-wagons of Mohalis, after twelve years of helping Leora check the laundry and worry about the price of steak, after a life of waiting in the slush for trolleys, it was not at all dismaying to have a valet who produced shirts automatically; not at all degrading to come to meals which were always interesting, and, in the discretion of his car, to lean an aching head against softness and think how clever he was. + 

“You see, by having other people do the vulgar things for you, it saves your own energy for the things that only you can do,” said Joyce. + 

Martin agreed, then drove to Westchester for a lesson in golf. + 

A week after their return from Europe, Joyce went with him to see Gottlieb. He fancied that Gottlieb came out of his brooding to smile on them. + 

“After all,” Martin considered, “the old man did like beautiful things. If he’d had the chance, he might’ve liked a big Establishment, too, maybe.” + 

Terry was surprisingly complaisant. + 

“I’ll tell you, Slim⁠—if you want to know. Personally I’d hate to have to live up to servants. But I’m getting old and wise. I figure that different folks like different things, and awful few of ’em have the sense to come and ask me what they ought to like. But honest, Slim, I don’t think I’ll come to dinner. I’ve gone and bought a dress-suit⁠—bought it! got it in my room⁠—damn landlady keeps filling it with mothballs⁠—but I don’t think I could stand listening to Latham Ireland being clever.” + 

It was, however, Rippleton Holabird’s attitude which most concerned Martin, for Holabird did not let him forget that unless he desired to drift off and be merely a ghostly Rich Woman’s husband, he would do well to remember who was Director. + 

Along with the endearing manners which he preserved for Ross McGurk, Holabird had developed the remoteness, the inhuman quiet courtesy, of the Man of Affairs, and people who presumed on his old glad days he courteously put in their places. He saw the need of repressing insubordination, when Arrowsmith appeared in a limousine. He gave him one week after his return to enjoy the limousine, then blandly called on him in his laboratory. + 

“Martin,” he sighed, “I find that our friend Ross McGurk is just a bit dissatisfied with the practical results that are coming out of the Institute and, to convince him, I’m afraid I really must ask you to put less emphasis on bacteriophage for the moment and take up influenza. The Rockefeller Institute has the right idea. They’ve utilized their best minds, and spent money magnificently, on such problems as pneumonia, meningitis, cancer. They’ve already lessened the terrors of meningitis and pneumonia, and yellow fever is on the verge of complete abolition through Noguchi’s work, and I have no doubt their hospital, with its enormous resources and splendidly cooperating minds, will be the first to find something to alleviate diabetes. Now, I understand, they’re hot after the cause of influenza. They’re not going to permit another great epidemic of it. Well, dear chap, it’s up to us to beat them on the flu, and I’ve chosen you to represent us in the race.” + 

Martin was at the moment hovering over a method of reproducing phage on dead bacteria, but he could not refuse, he could not risk being discharged. He was too rich! Martin the renegade medical student could flounder off and be a soda-clerk, but if the husband of Joyce Lanyon should indulge in such insanity, he would be followed by reporters and photographed at the soda handles. Still less could he chance becoming merely her supported husband⁠—a butler of the boudoir. + 

He assented, not very pleasantly. + 

He began to work on the cause of influenza with a half-heartedness almost magnificent. In the hospitals he secured cultures from cases which might be influenza and might be bad colds⁠—no one was certain just what the influenza symptoms were; nothing was clean cut. He left most of the work to his assistants, occasionally giving them sardonic directions to “put on another hundred tubes of the A medium⁠—hell, make it another thousand!” and when he found that they were doing as they pleased, he was not righteous nor rebuking. If he did not guiltily turn his hand from the plow it was only because he never touched the plow. Once his own small laboratory had been as fussily neat as a New Hampshire kitchen. Now the several rooms under his charge were a disgrace, with long racks of abandoned test-tubes, many half-filled with mold, none of them properly labeled. + 

Then he had his idea. He began firmly to believe that the Rockefeller investigators had found the cause of flu. He gushed in to Holabird and told him so. As for himself, he was going back to his search for the real nature of phage. + 

Holabird argued that Martin must be wrong. If Holabird wanted the McGurk Institute⁠—and the Director of the McGurk Institute⁠—to have the credit for capturing influenza, then it simply could not be possible that Rockefeller was ahead of them. He also said weighty things about phage. Its essential nature, he pointed out, was an academic question. + 

But Martin was by now too much of a scientific dialectician for Holabird, who gave up and retired to his den (or so Martin gloomily believed) to devise new ways of plaguing him. For a time Martin was again left free to wallow in work. + 

He found a means of reproducing phage on dead bacteria by a very complicated, very delicate use of partial oxygen-carbon dioxide tension⁠—as exquisite as cameo-carving, as improbable as weighing the stars. His report stirred the laboratory world, and here and there (in Tokyo, in Amsterdam, in Winnemac) enthusiasts believed he had proven that phage was a living organism; and other enthusiasts said, in esoteric language with mathematical formulae, that he was a liar and six kinds of a fool. + 

It was at this time, when he might have become a Great Man, that he pitched over most of his own work and some of the duties of being Joyce’s husband to follow Terry Wickett, which showed that he lacked common sense, because Terry was still an assistant while he himself was head of a department. + 

Terry had discovered that certain quinine derivatives when introduced into the animal body slowly decompose into products which are highly toxic to bacteria but only mildly toxic to the body. There was hinted here a whole new world of therapy. Terry explained it to Martin, and invited him to collaborate. Buoyant with great things they got leave from Holabird⁠—and from Joyce⁠—and though it was winter they went off to Birdies’ Rest, in the Vermont hills. While they snowshoed and shot rabbits, and all the long dark evenings while they lay on their bellies before the fire, they ranted and planned. + 

Martin had not been so long silk-wrapped that he could not enjoy gobbling salt pork after the northwest wind and the snow. It was not unpleasant to be free of thinking up new compliments for Joyce. + 

They had, they saw, to answer an interesting question: Do the quinine derivatives act by attaching themselves to the bacteria, or by changing the body fluids? It was a simple, clear, definite question which required for answer only the inmost knowledge of chemistry and biology, a few hundred animals on which to experiment, and perhaps ten or twenty or a million years of trying and failing. + 

They decided to work with the pneumococcus, and with the animal which should most nearly reproduce human pneumonia. This meant the monkey, and to murder monkeys is expensive and rather grim. Holabird, as Director, could supply them, but if they took him into confidence he would demand immediate results. + 

Terry meditated, “ ’Member there was one of these Nobel-prize winners, Slim, one of these plumb fanatics that instead of blowing in the prize spent the whole thing on chimps and other apes, and he got together with another of those whiskery old birds, and they ducked up alleys and kept the anti-viv folks from prosecuting them, and settled the problem of the transfer of syphilis to lower animals? But we haven’t got any Nobel Prize, I grieve to tell you, and it doesn’t look to me⁠—” + 

“Terry, I’ll do it, if necessary! I’ve never sponged on Joyce yet, but I will now, if the Holy Wren holds out on us.” + 