“By Jove, she’s done it,” said he. “It won’t bear much knocking about, of course, but it stands as firm as a rock. It’s only a woman,” he added, “who’d think of mending a brass candlestick with sealing-wax.”
“It’s only a woman who’d succeed,” said I.
But this has nothing to do with mathematics, and it is of mathematics that I want to speak.
If you have any interest in photography, you know how tricksy a matter is the exposure of a plate. It is tricksy to you and I will tell you why. It is because your academic study of the process has taught you that the two-thousandth part of a second is sufficient exposure in order to get cloud effects. Conceive, then, how your brain whirls with figures when you come to take a photograph of an interior or a portrait of some one sitting in a room. I will not remind you of the tortures which your mind must suffer, nor the result of such torture when at last you develop the plate in the dark-room—both are too painful to speak about. Now, a woman knows nothing about this two-thousandth part of a second. She would not believe there were such a measurable fraction of time if you told her. She just exposes the plate; that is all.
One day I had to get a photograph taken in a hurry. I marched into a photographer’s in the Strand. There was first a narrow passage, hung with frames filled with photos of young men and young women looking their worst in their best. Then I was confronted by a flight of stairs which I mounted, to find myself in a great big room hung also with photographs—photographs of family groups, of babies in their characteristic attitudes as their mothers had given them to the world. Every conceivable sort of photograph was there, but the room, except for an American roll-topped desk near the window, was empty.
I coughed, and the head of a young girl—not more than twenty years of age—popped up above the desk.
“Can Mr. Robinson take my photograph this morning?” I asked.
“Mr. Robinson is not in at present,” she replied.
“I rather wanted my photograph taken in a hurry,” said I.
“Oh, you can have it taken,” said she. “Would you like it done at once?”