Mrs. Mar, as she clicked her needles and oscillated her entire frame, kept her eye on the place where she was going to dash into Eckermann the instant Hildegarde was settled to her sewing. But true to the sacred principle of doing something while she was waiting, Mrs. Mar thus delayed, saw it to be a timely moment to put Jack Galbraith in his proper place. It was not the sort of thing you could do thoroughly once, and be done with. Like house-cleaning, it required to be seen to periodically. “Well, what’s the epoche-machende news this time?” As her husband made no haste to answer, “He’s always ‘going to break the record,’ that young gentleman! I never knew anybody with so many big words in his mouth.”
The stricture was deserved enough to gall Jack’s friend, who moved uneasily in his revolving chair. But he kept his eyes on the map he was drawing and he kept his lips close shut.
“I see precious little result so far,” she was beginning again.
“The result,” interrupted Mar, “will be judged when he’s finished his life-work, not while he’s still preparing for it.”
“Preparing! Bless me, isn’t he old enough to have done something, if he was ever going to?”
“If he were going into business, yes. Science is a longer story.”
“One excuse is as good as another, I suppose, when a man wants to please himself. It’s like Galbraith to call his fecklessness by a highfalutin name. ‘Science,’ ‘Investigation,’ ‘Anthropology.’ Humph! But it does sound better, I agree, than saying he likes satisfying a low curiosity about savages. It isn’t even as if he wanted to convert them. Not he! Likes them best as they are: filthy and degraded. ‘Philology?’ Tomfoolology!”
It was more even than the tranquil Hildegarde could bear. “Hasn’t he done something wonderful about ocean currents, papa? Didn’t you say that was the real reason why he went that last time to—?”
“Yes. It was a piece of work that brought him recognition very creditable to so young a student.”
“Whose recognition?” Not hers, the critic of the rocking-chair seemed to say. But Mar took no notice. “And where’s that book he was boasting about six months ago? The one that was going to shed such valuable new light on the—the—Jugginses of No Man’s Land. So far as I can see by the feeble light of the female intellect, the Jugginses still sit in the dark. Haven’t you found that roll of seersucker yet, Hildegarde? Upon my soul!”—faster flew the needles, harder rocked the chair—“compared with you a snail is a cross between an acrobat and a hurricane.”