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"You English are wonderful," he murmured, as he took the paper. "Imagine you doing that! Then," he added, resuming the confidential tone, "I suppose you will leave the Foucault now, hein?" "I suppose so," she said carelessly. "You go to England?" She turned to him, as she patted the creases out of a strip of paper with a duster, and shook her head. "Not to England?" "No."
The terms were modest, but the respectability was prodigious. All the glory of this tenancy fell upon Sophia. Madame Foucault was deeply impressed. Characteristically she began at once to construct a theory that Sophia had only to walk out of the house in order to discover ideal tenants for the rooms.
An idea hung in the air like a scientific discovery on the point of being made by several independent investigators simultaneously that she and Madame Foucault should co-operate in order to let furnished rooms at a remunerative profit.
Almost every great scientific discovery is approached contemporaneously by many minds, the fact that one mind usually confers upon it the distinctness of demonstration being an illustration, not of genius isolated, but of genius in advance. Thus Foucault, in 1849, came to the verge of Kirchhoff's discovery.
Then Young applied the wave theory to the explanation of polarization and other phenomena; and in 1851 Foucault proved experimentally that the velocity of light was less in water than in air, as it should be if the wave theory be true, and this has been considered a crucial experiment which took away the last hope for the corpuscular theory, and demonstrated the existence of the ether as a space-filling medium capable of transmitting light-waves known to have a velocity of 186,000 miles per second.
The large telescopes of the old world those of Herschel, Rosse, and Foucault were invariably fixed upon the Queen of Night, for the weather was magnificent in Europe, but the relative weakness of these instruments prevented any useful observation. On the 6th the same weather reigned. Impatience devoured three parts of the globe.
"I do not like to accept money from you," said Madame Foucault. "But why not?" "You will have the doctor to pay." "Please do not talk in that way," said Sophia. "I have money, and I can pay for everything, and I shall pay for everything." She was annoyed because she was sure that Madame Foucault was only making a pretence of delicacy, and that in any case her delicacy was preposterous.
'I did what I could for you! Sophia would have died sooner than remind any one of a benefit conferred, and Madame Foucault had committed precisely that enormity. The appeal was inexcusable to a fine mind; but it was effective. The men were behind the door, listening. Sophia paid out of her stock of notes. Needless to say, the total was more and not less than a thousand francs.
Foucault, the inventor of the apparatus, obtains a perfectly regular combustion through the use of a central column, 15, charged with fuel, closed at the upper part, open beneath, and entering a furnace that is fed by it with regularity, the zone of combustion not being able to extend beyond the level of the draught.
If the devotion was not to be paid for, then seventy-five francs a week was assuredly too much, as during more than half the time Sophia had had almost no food. Madame Foucault was therefore within the truth when she again protested, at sight of the bank- notes which Sophia brought from her trunk: "I am sure that it is too much." "Not at all!" Sophia repeated. "Nine weeks at seventy-five.
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