Unhappily, no record exists of the conversation between the Wonder and Herr Grossmann.
The Professor seems at the last moment to have had some misgiving as to the nature of the interview that was before him, and refused to have a witness to the proceedings.
Challis made the introduction, and he says that the Wonder regarded Grossmann with perhaps rather more attention than he commonly conceded to strangers; and that the Professor exhibited the usual signs of embarrassment.
Altogether, Grossmann was in the library for about half an hour, and he displayed no sign of perturbation when he rejoined Challis and Elmer in the breakfast-room. Indeed, only one fact of any significance emerges to throw suspicion on Grossmann's attitude during the progress of that secluded half-hour with the greatest intellect of all time—the Professor's spectacles had been broken.
He spoke of the accident with a casual air when he was in the breakfast-room, but Challis remarked a slight flush on the great scientist's face as he referred, perhaps a trifle too ostentatiously, to the incident. And although it is worthless as evidence, there is something rather suspicious in Challis's discovery of finely powdered glass in his library—a mere pinch on the parquet near the further window of the big room, several feet away from the table at which the Wonder habitually sat. Challis would never have noticed the glass, had not one larger atom that had escaped pulverisation, caught the light from the window and drawn his attention.
But even this find is in no way conclusive. The Professor may quite well have walked over to the window, taken off his spectacles to wipe them and dropped them as he, himself, explained. While the crushing of some fragment of one of the lenses was probably due to the chance of his stepping upon it, as he turned on his heel to continue the momentarily interrupted conversation. It is hard to believe that so great a man as Grossmann could have been convulsed by a petty rage that found expression in some act of wanton destruction.
His own brief account of the interview accords very well with the single reference to the Wonder which exists in the literature of the world. This reference is a footnote to a second edition of Grossmann's brochure entitled "An Explanation of Certain Intellectual Abnormalities reported in History" ("Eine Erklärung gewisser Intellektueller geschichtlich überlieferter Anormalen Erscheinungen"). This footnote comes at the end of Grossmann's masterly analysis of the Heinecken case and reads: "I recently examined a similar case of abnormality in England, but found that it presented no such marked divergence from the type as would demand serious investigation."
And in his brief account of the interview rendered to Challis and Elmer, Herr Grossmann, in effect, did no more than draft that footnote.
IV
It must remain uncertain, now, whether or not Elmer would have persisted in his endeavour to exploit the Wonder to the confounding of Grossmann, despite Challis's explicit statement that he would do no more, not even if it were to save the reputation of the Royal Society. Elmer certainly had the virtue of persistence and might have made the attempt. But in one of his rare moments of articulate speech, the Wonder decided the fate of that threatened controversy beyond the possibility of appeal.