The determining cause of his consent was the fact that the book was already in press.  The Professor knew little about the workings of the press, but the phrase gave him a sense of finality, of having been caught himself in the toils of that mysterious engine.  If he had had time to think the matter over, his scruples might have dragged him back; but his conscience was eased by the futility of resistance.

IV

Mrs. Linyard did not often read the papers; and there was therefore a special significance in her approaching her husband one evening after dinner with a copy of the New York Investigator in her hand.  Her expression lent solemnity to the act:  Mrs. Linyard had a limited but distinctive set of expressions, and she now looked as she did when the President of the University came to dine.

“You didn’t tell me of this, Samuel,” she said in a slightly tremulous voice.

“Tell you of what?” returned the Professor, reddening to the margin of his baldness.

“That you had published a book—­I might never have heard of it if Mrs. Pease hadn’t brought me the paper.”

Her husband rubbed his eye-glasses with a groan.  “Oh, you would have heard of it,” he said gloomily.

Mrs. Linyard stared.  “Did you wish to keep it from me, Samuel?” And as he made no answer, she added with irresistible pride:  “Perhaps you don’t know what beautiful things have been said about it.”

He took the paper with a reluctant hand.  “Has Pease been saying beautiful things about it?”

“The Professor?  Mrs. Pease didn’t say he had mentioned it.”

The author heaved a sigh of relief.  His book, as Harviss had prophesied, had caught the autumn market:  had caught and captured it.  The publisher had conducted the campaign like an experienced strategist.  He had completely surrounded the enemy.  Every newspaper, every periodical, held in ambush an advertisement of “The Vital Thing.”  Weeks in advance the great commander had begun to form his lines of attack.  Allusions to the remarkable significance of the coming work had appeared first in the scientific and literary reviews, spreading thence to the supplements of the daily journals.  Not a moment passed without a quickening touch to the public consciousness:  seventy millions of people were forced to remember at least once a day that Professor Linyard’s book was on the verge of appearing.  Slips emblazoned with the question:  Have you read “The Vital Thing"? fell from the pages of popular novels and whitened the floors of crowded street-cars.  The query, in large lettering, assaulted the traveller at the railway bookstall, confronted him on the walls of “elevated” stations, and seemed, in its ascending scale, about to supplant the interrogations as to soap and stove-polish which animate our rural scenery.