“Yes. Of course. Maybe I could play the piano in a movie theater.”
He might not have done it without her loyalty, but when Dawson Hunziker next paraded into the laboratory, demanding, “Now look here. We’ve fussed long enough. We got to put your stuff on the market,” then Gottlieb answered, “No. If you wait till I have done all I can—maybe one year, probably three—you shall have it. But not till I am sure. No.”
Hunziker went off huffily, and Gottlieb prepared for sentence.
Then the card of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Director of the McGurk Institute of Biology, of New York, was brought to him.
Gottlieb knew of Tubbs. He had never visited McGurk but he considered it, next to Rockefeller and McCormick, the soundest and freest organization for pure scientific research in the country, and if he had pictured a Heavenly laboratory in which good scientists might spend eternity in happy and thoroughly impractical research, he would have devised it in the likeness of McGurk. He was mildly pleased that its director should have called on him.
Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs was tremendously whiskered on all visible spots save his nose and temples and the palms of his hands, short but passionately whiskered, like a Scotch terrier. Yet they were not comic whiskers; they were the whiskers of dignity; and his eyes were serious, his step an earnest trot, his voice a piping solemnity.
“Dr. Gottlieb, this is a great pleasure. I have heard your papers at the Academy of Sciences but, to my own loss, I have hitherto failed to have an introduction to you.”
Gottlieb tried not to sound embarrassed.
Tubbs looked at the assistants, like a plotter in a political play, and hinted, “May we have a talk—”
Gottlieb led him to his office, overlooking a vast bustle of sidetracks, of curving rails and brown freight-cars, and Tubbs urged: