Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/444

 glowing, making diagrams with his thumb-nail on the tablecloth, she would interrupt him with a gracious "Darling—do you mind—just a second— Plinder, isn't there any more of the sherry?"

When she turned back to him, though her eyes were kind his enthusiasm was gone.

She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes, and begged him to bully her into understanding, but she never sat back watching for silent hours.

Suddenly, in his bogged floundering in the laboratory, he touched solid earth. He blundered into the effect of phage on the mutation of bacterial species—very beautiful, very delicate—and after plodding months when he had been a sane citizen, an almost good husband, an excellent bridge-player, and a rotten workman, he knew again the happiness of high taut insanity.

He wanted to work nights, every night. During his uninspired fumbling, there had been nothing to hold him at the Institute after five, and Joyce had become used to having him flee to her. Now he showed an inconvenient ability to ignore engagements, to snap at delightful guests who asked him to explain all about science, to forget even her and the baby.

"I've got to work evenings!" he said. "I can't be regular and easy about it when I'm caught by a big experiment, any more than you could be regular and easy and polite when you were gestating the baby."

"I know but— Darling, you get so nervous when you're working like this. Heavens, I don't care how much you offend people by missing engagements—well, after all, I wish you wouldn't, but I do know it may be unavoidable. But when you make yourself so drawn and trembly, are you gaining time in the long run? It's just for your own sake. Oh, I have it! Wait! You'll see what a scientist I am! No, I won't explain—not yet!"

Joyce had wealth and energy. A week later, flushed, slim, gallant, joyous, she said to him after dinner, "I've got a surprise for you!"

She led him to the unoccupied rooms over the garage, behind their house. In that week, using a score of workmen from the most immaculate and elaborate scientific supply-house in the country, she had created for him the best bacteriological