“His faith saw the beautiful truth of things, nothing else. It was the same quality he loved best in Jack. He used to say that Jack’s faith was like the morning lark. Nothing could keep it from soaring and singing.”
“Then he is the right person to edit those papers and you have reason to be happy.”
Mrs. Lee looked down into Rosamond’s eyes with unwonted solemnity.
“Mrs. Mearely, I am going to tell you something now which, in days to come, you will hear from many others. Then you will remember that it was I who first told it to you—here, in this little room. Professor Lee was one of the world’s great and original minds, though the world has not yet found it out.”
“Dear Mrs. Lee, I am sure he was.”
“While Jack, of course, agrees with me about that, he feels that Professor Lee’s highest value was of another quality. He writes somewhere in this letter—wait; yes, it is in this one—mum-m-m.” She buzzed softly over the lines, hunting for the passage. “Ah! here it is:
“I think that to lay stress, in a preface, upon the vastness and originality of Professor Lee’s intellect would be a mistake. Besides, in these careless days, the words have been misapplied until their meaning is nil.”
She looked up from the letter. “He means by that, dear, that while the words are truly applicable to Professor Lee they would fail to make him so conceived of by the reader; because they have been used noisily by persons of no judgment to describe men of shallow attainments—like some of those unfortunate foreign professors, for instance, who are so pathetically askew about everything. Poor things. It was the electron that set them all off. My dear husband used to say that the atomic theory, though purely materialistic and proving nothing in the world, was nevertheless not inimical to scientists’ sobriety and dignity, but that, when they lost the atom, they lost their heads and their shoes and their shirts as well! The electronic theory proved too exciting for them. He would say to me: ‘My dear, they should have held on to the atom. It was much the safer toy!’ When I saw the other day that radium has shown that matter disappears altogether, I wondered what the poor things would do now. They must be dreadfully disturbed.” She paused, shaking her head from side to side in sympathy.
“What else does Mr. Falcon say about Professor Lee?” Rosamond called her back, tactfully, to the main point.
“Ah! none knows better than Jack that Professor Lee was secretly a very great man. He goes on to say: