Gray was thirty-eight, and
tall and slender and handsome, a little bald in front, alert, quick in
his movements, business-like, prompt, decided, unsentimental, and with
that kind of trim-chiseled face that just seems to glint and sparkle with
frosty intellectuality! He was a renowned scientist. I do not know what
the word means, but my mother would know how to use it and get effects.
She would know how to depress a rat-terrier with it and make a lap-dog
look sorry he came. But that is not the best one; the best one was
Laboratory. My mother could organize a Trust on that one that would skin
the tax-collars off the whole herd. The laboratory was not a book, or a
picture, or a place to wash your hands in, as the college president's dog
said--no, that is the lavatory; the laboratory is quite different, and is
filled with jars, and bottles, and electrics, and wires, and strange
machines; and every week other scientists came there and sat in the
place, and used the machines, and discussed, and made what they called
experiments and discoveries; and often I came, too, and stood around and
listened, and tried to learn, for the sake of my mother, and in loving
memory of her, although it was a pain to me, as realizing what she was
losing out of her life and I gaining nothing at all; for try as I might,
I was never able to make anything out of it at all.
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