Meanwhile the success of the Scientific Sermons was facilitating his family relations.  His photograph in the Inglenook, to which the lady of the note-book had succeeded in appending a vivid interview, carried his fame to circles inaccessible even to “The Vital Thing”; and the Professor found himself the man of the hour.  He soon grew used to the functions of the office, and gave out hundred-dollar interviews on every subject, from labour-strikes to Babism, with a frequency which reacted agreeably on the domestic exchequer.  Presently his head began to figure in the advertising pages of the magazines.  Admiring readers learned the name of the only breakfast-food in use at his table, of the ink with which “The Vital Thing” had been written, the soap with which the author’s hands were washed, and the tissue-builder which fortified him for further effort.  These confidences endeared the Professor to millions of readers, and his head passed in due course from the magazine and the newspaper to the biscuit-tin and the chocolate-box.

VI

The Professor, all the while, was leading a double life.  While the author of “The Vital Thing” reaped the fruits of popular approval, the distinguished microscopist continued his laboratory work unheeded save by the few who were engaged in the same line of investigations.  His divided allegiance had not hitherto affected the quality of his work:  it seemed to him that he returned to the laboratory with greater zest after an afternoon in a drawing-room where readings from “The Vital Thing” had alternated with plantation melodies and tea.  He had long ceased to concern himself with what his colleagues thought of his literary career.  Of the few whom he frequented, none had referred to “The Vital Thing”; and he knew enough of their lives to guess that their silence might as fairly be attributed to indifference as to disapproval.  They were intensely interested in the Professor’s views on beetles, but they really cared very little what he thought of the Almighty.

The Professor entirely shared their feelings, and one of his chief reasons for cultivating the success which accident had bestowed on him, was that it enabled him to command a greater range of appliances for his real work.  He had known what it was to lack books and instruments; and “The Vital Thing” was the magic wand which summoned them to his aid.  For some time he had been feeling his way along the edge of a discovery:  balancing himself with professional skill on a plank of hypothesis flung across an abyss of uncertainty.  The conjecture was the result of years of patient gathering of facts:  its corroboration would take months more of comparison and classification.  But at the end of the vista victory loomed.  The Professor felt within himself that assurance of ultimate justification which, to the man of science, makes a life-time seem the mere comma between premiss and deduction.  But he had reached the point where his conjectures required formulation.  It was only by giving them expression, by exposing them to the comment and criticism of his associates, that he could test their final value; and this inner assurance was confirmed by the only friend whose confidence he invited.