which Conroy had said "I might." When his cousin went out rather guiltily, he turned, almost with relief, to the page of his book.
He had come to college with a conception of the universe which he had formed, as a boy, in the Sabbath school, accepting as literally true all the symbols of his religion. And the first lectures in biology and geology had come on him like Miss Morris's first criticisms of his childish fancies. But now, instead of an infantile resentment of change, he had a young man's eagerness for knowledge; he did not pause to examine what he was learning; he hurried along, blindly, with a pathetic trust in the guidance of his teachers, assured that he was rising above his boyish ignorance of Science to the serene heights of wisdom and broad views of life.
In the absorption of such a progress, all his cousin's noisy claims on his time were a trivial interruption. He received calmly the news that Conroy had found a room-mate in the University Residence. And he sat down alone to his studies, on the night after Conroy's removal, like a philosophic anchorite to his meditations.
He had had two startling shocks within the week—one in a biological lecture that had ended a long series of proofs of the kinship of man with the animals by discussing the intimate physiological relation between man and the anthropoid apes; and the other in a geological lecture in which the professor, having put down the tooth of a mammoth and dusted the black-board chalk from his hands, had announced,
