On the day of publication, the Professor had withdrawn to his laboratory.  The shriek of the advertisements was in his ears, and his one desire was to avoid all knowledge of the event they heralded.  A reaction of self-consciousness had set in, and if Harviss’s cheque had sufficed to buy up the first edition of “The Vital Thing” the Professor would gladly have devoted it to that purpose.  But the sense of inevitableness gradually subdued him, and he received his wife’s copy of the Investigator with a kind of impersonal curiosity.  The review was a long one, full of extracts:  he saw, as he glanced over them, how well they would look in a volume of “Selections.”  The reviewer began by thanking his author “for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of ringing optimism, of faith in man’s destiny and the supremacy of good, which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent nihilism....  It is well,” the writer continued, “when such reminders come to us not from the moralist but from the man of science—­when from the desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there rises this glorious cry of faith and reconstruction.”

The review was minute and exhaustive.  Thanks no doubt to Harviss’s diplomacy, it had been given to the Investigator’s “best man,” and the Professor was startled by the bold eye with which his emancipated fallacies confronted him.  Under the reviewer’s handling they made up admirably as truths, and their author began to understand Harviss’s regret that they should be used for any less profitable purpose.

The Investigator, as Harviss phrased it, “set the pace,” and the other journals followed, finding it easier to let their critical man-of-all-work play a variation on the first reviewer’s theme than to secure an expert to “do” the book afresh.  But it was evident that the Professor had captured his public, for all the resources of the profession could not, as Harviss gleefully pointed out, have carried the book so straight to the heart of the nation.  There was something noble in the way in which Harviss belittled his own share in the achievement, and insisted on the inutility of shoving a book which had started with such headway on.

“All I ask you is to admit that I saw what would happen,” he said with a touch of professional pride.  “I knew you’d struck the right note—­I knew they’d be quoting you from Maine to San Francisco.  Good as fiction?  It’s better—­it’ll keep going longer.”

“Will it?” said the Professor with a slight shudder.  He was resigned to an ephemeral triumph, but the thought of the book’s persistency frightened him.