Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/310

 potential, that he stumbled again into raging humility, again saw himself an impostor and a tenth-rater.

He read the classics of physical science: Copernicus and Galileo, Lavoisier, Newton, LaPlace, Descartes, Faraday. He became completely bogged in Newton's "Fluxions"; he spoke of Newton to Tubbs and found that the illustrious Director knew nothing about him. He cheerfully mentioned this to Terry, and was shockingly cursed for his conceit as a "nouveau cultured," as a "typical enthusiastic convert," and so returned to the work whose end is satisfying because there is never an end.

His life did not seem edifying nor in any degree amusing. When Tubbs peeped into his laboratory he found a humorless young man going about his tests of hemolytic toxins with no apparent flair for the Real Big Thing in Science, which was coöperation and being efficient. Tubbs tried to set him straight with "Are you quite sure you're following a regular demarked line in your work?"

It was Leora who bore the real tedium.

She sat quiet (a frail child, only up to one's shoulder, not nine minutes older than at marriage, nine years before), or she napped inoffensively, in the long living-room of their flat, while he worked over his dreary digit-infested books till one, till two, and she politely awoke to let him worry at her, "But look here now, I've got to keep up my research at the same time. God, I am so tired!"

She dragged him away for an illegal five-day walk on Cape Cod, in March. He sat between the Twin Lights at Chatham, and fumed, "I'm going back and tell Terry and Gottlieb they can go to the devil with their crazy physical chemistry. I've had enough, now I've done math," and she commented, "Yes, I certainly would—though isn't it funny how Dr. Gottlieb always seems to be right?"

He was so absorbed in staphylolysin and in calculus that he did not realize the world was about to be made safe for democracy. He was a little dazed when America entered the war.

Dr. Tubbs dashed to Washington to offer the services of the Institute to the War Department.