To put it mildly, Mr. Howard Madison Grey was stupefied. However, the success of "The Great Reprieve" became the talk of the town. An ex-President of the United States went to see it and drenched his box with the tears of hilarity and contentment. Next day, he described the play as "a clean, wholesome play of American life, manners and thought!—every one hundred per cent American will be satisfied with it."
This description was henceforth underscored in every advertisement of "The Great Reprieve." Seats were sold ten weeks in advance. The producer and his crew of play-salvagers added another feather to their caps. And Mrs. Howard Madison Grey began to look for an apartment on upper Park Avenue.
IV
The ensuing increase in the volume of engagements and correspondence threw Janet together with Mr. Grey for uninterrupted stretches, oftener than Mrs. Grey thought wise.
Before long, the author's wife noted significant alterations in her husband's behavior.
Mrs. Howard Madison Grey was nothing if not scientific. She believed religiously in the scientific method and applied it to all her activities, even to her excursions in jealousy. As she hadn't read "Science and Power" by Fitzfield Tyler, the efficiency engineer, for nothing, she understood thoroughly that the proper method for scientific research proceeds by three stages, namely:
One: Observing facts, without any preconceived notion.
Two: Imagining a general explanation or hypothesis that establishes the relation of cause and effect between two groups of facts.
Three: Verifying this hypothesis, a process of determining by means of personally conducted observations, whether the hypothesis fits the facts it proposes to explain.
Observing, imagining, verifying—these were the three stages the trained investigator had to grasp. And Mrs. Howard Madison Grey grasped them with considerable kinetic energy.