Hanson had committed one pardonable error; pardonable because Hanson, for all of his years and his experience, was no worker of miracles, to whom nothing is hidden, and who can be called omniscient.

For all of his experience in wending his way through the hidden recesses of the labyrinth we call the human mind, Hanson did not know everything and would have been the first to admit this honestly. But he did know that the trouble with both Maculay and Ava Longacre laid in the subsurfaces of the conscious mind. Blocks, inhibitions, and fears instilled as a youth had driven Maculay to seek his excellence in mathematics as a goal rather than as the means to the normal goal of a happy, balanced life. In the filing-cabinet of the mind, however; in the subconscious mind of Clifford Maculay was all of the data of the life he should have led, held there subdued by the blocks of the conscious mind. Hanson had opened the doorway by removing these blocks, and he had done a fine job.

In much the same fashion he had removed the blocks and impediments from Ava Longacre's mind.

Both had suffered from too puritanical an upbringing. In the long distance that lies between white saint and black evil, there is a long dimension lying just below center that is the despair of reformers and do-gooders. This region contains many people and many ideals that are mal in dictu. Some impractical reformer had decided, for instance, that liquor is to be abhorred; ergo it is against the desires of society for a man to take a drink. Just one. The idea is, of course, to create a race of saints and Little Lord Fauntleroy sweetness—which probably wouldn't last out the century since the desire to poke someone in the nose for stepping on your rights—or your toe—is the same belligerency that has made mankind fight its way up from the swamps to seek the stars.

Below this region of morals or ethics lies the mal in facto behaviour. It is bad in fact and practice to murder, steal, and lie.

Hanson had opened the minds of his pair to the enjoyment of the middle region after a short life of the stilted upper bracket. Like the swing of the pendulum, both Ava and Clifford had dropped about as far as they could go without getting into the truly evil region.

But the doctor's error was in not realizing that the human mind, once released of its inhibitions, can make a shrewd calculation. In the case of Ava Longacre, whose mental blocks would have rendered her undesirable to Cliff Maculay; when once released, the woman's mind 

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