“I don’t know that the Inglenook would help much,” he said, “but I suppose this might.”

Mrs. Linyard’s eyes glowed with maternal avidity.

“What is it, Samuel?”

“A series of ‘Scientific Sermons’ for the Round-the-Gas-Log column of The Woman’s World.  I believe that journal has a larger circulation than any other weekly, and they pay in proportion.”

He had not even asked the extent of Jack’s indebtedness.  It had been so easy to relieve recent domestic difficulties by the timely production of Harviss’s two cheques, that it now seemed natural to get Mrs. Linyard out of the room by promising further reinforcements.  The Professor had indignantly rejected Harviss’s suggestion that he should follow up his success by a second volume on the same lines.  He had sworn not to lend more than a passive support to the fraud of “The Vital Thing”; but the temptation to free himself from Mrs. Linyard prevailed over his last scruples, and within an hour he was at work on the Scientific Sermons.

The Professor was not an unkind man.  He really enjoyed making his family happy; and it was his own business if his reward for so doing was that it kept them out of his way.  But the success of “The Vital Thing” gave him more than this negative satisfaction.  It enlarged his own existence and opened new doors into other lives.  The Professor, during fifty virtuous years, had been cognizant of only two types of women:  the fond and foolish, whom one married, and the earnest and intellectual, whom one did not.  Of the two, he infinitely preferred the former, even for conversational purposes.  But as a social instrument woman was unknown to him; and it was not till he was drawn into the world on the tide of his literary success that he discovered the deficiencies in his classification of the sex.  Then he learned with astonishment of the existence of a third type:  the woman who is fond without foolishness and intellectual without earnestness.  Not that the Professor inspired, or sought to inspire, sentimental emotions; but he expanded in the warm atmosphere of personal interest which some of his new acquaintances contrived to create about him.  It was delightful to talk of serious things in a setting of frivolity, and to be personal without being domestic.

Even in this new world, where all subjects were touched on lightly, and emphasis was the only indelicacy, the Professor found himself constrained to endure an occasional reference to his book.  It was unpleasant at first; but gradually he slipped into the habit of hearing it talked of, and grew accustomed to telling pretty women just how “it had first come to him.”