156 SCIENTIST 



perked, and he was a bit surprised to find his teen-age 

 daughter Carol frying some eggs and bacon for them both. 

 Carol was something of a puzzle to him. She had always 

 been on the honor roll in school with especially good marks 

 in Enghsh and French; she played the cello in the orchestra 

 and seemed to have a variety of intellectual and artistic 

 interests. But she "hated" science and despised math even 

 though her marks in these subjects never fell below a B. 

 Recently all her marks had fallen off a Uttle, and she was 

 in danger of falling to the second group of honor students. 

 She had begun to go to dances almost every week, and 

 it seemed probable that the time she spent on the telephone 

 could easily explain the falling off in her schoolwork. 



Indeed, she explained her early appearance in the kitchen 

 as owing to the necessity of finishing a French paper before 

 she left for school at eight-fifteen. Watching her competent 

 handling of the frying pan and her efforts to make the 

 breakfast nook something more than a mere workbench, it 

 suddenly dawned on Bill that she might be trying herself out 

 as a homemaker. And then came the thought that someday, 

 and maybe quite soon, he would have to release this sweet, 

 beautiful, really unusually talented girl to some oaf in 

 chinos who wanted to live in a trailer and work his way 

 through graduate school. Even worse, he might not be a 

 graduate student at all but some dull salesman type who 

 wanted nothing better than to belong to a suburban country 

 club. 



Like most biochemists, indeed like most natural scien- 

 tists. Bill had been so much taken up by biochemistry that 

 he really had not had much time or incentive to ruminate 

 about other aspects of life which showed relatively Httle 

 promise of ever being put into some neat formula. His own 

 sound natural instincts had taken him into marriage and 

 through the early years in which the children were growing 



