in an architect's office, a shipbuilding yard, or a
locomotive shop. He could find the strain at any part of an iron frame
building by the differential and integral calculus to the millionth of an
ounce, but the everyday technical routine work with volumes of
ready-made tables was unfamiliar and uncongenial to him; he would
rather have calculated the tables themselves. The true science of
mathematics is the most imaginative and creative of all sciences, but
the mere application of mathematics to figures for the construction of
engines, ships, or buildings is the dullest sort of drudgery.
Rather than that, he had chosen to teach what he knew and to dream of
great problems at his leisure when teaching was over for the day or for
the term. He had taught in a small college, and had known the rare
delight of having one or two pupils who were really interested. It had
been a good position, and he had married a clever New England girl,
the daughter of his predecessor, who had died suddenly. They had been
very happy together for years, and one boy had been born to them,
whom his father insisted on christening Newton. Then Overholt had
thrown up his employment for the sake of getting freedom to perfect
his invention, though much against his wife's advice, for she was a
prudent little woman, besides being clever, and she thought of the
future of the two beings she loved, and of her own, while her husband
dreamed of hastening the progress of science.
Overholt came to New York because he could work better there than
elsewhere, and could get better tools made, and could obtain more
easily the materials he wanted. For a time everything went well enough,
but when the investors began to lose faith in him things went very
badly.
Then Mrs. Overholt told her husband that two could live where three
could not, especially when one was a boy of twelve; and as she would
not break his heart by teasing him into giving up the invention as a
matter of duty, she told him that she would support herself until it was
perfected or until he abandoned it of his own accord. She was very well
fitted to be a governess; she was thirty years old and as strong as a
pony, she said, and she had friends in New England who could find her
a situation. He should see her whenever it was possible, she added, but
there was no other way.
Now it is not easy to find a thoroughly respectable married governess
of unexceptionably good manners, who comes of a good stock and is
able to teach young ladies. Such a person is a treasure to rich people
who need somebody to take charge of their girls while they fly round
and round the world in automobiles, seeking whom they may destroy.
Therefore Mrs. Overholt obtained a very good place before long, and
when the family in which she taught had its next attack of European
fever and it was decided that the girls must stay in Munich to improve
their German and their music, Mrs. Overholt was offered an increase of
salary if she would take them there and see to it, while their parents
quartered Germany, France, Spain, and Austria at the rate of forty miles
an hour, or even fifty and sixty where the roads were good. If the
parents broke their necks, Mrs. Overholt would take the children home;
but this was rather in the understanding than in the agreement.
Such was the position when John Henry sat down upon the lid of
Pandora's box in a sunny corner of the Central Park and reflected on Mr.
Burnside's remark that "there was plenty of hope about." The inventor
thought that there was not much, but such as it was, he did not mean to
part with it on the ground that the man of business had called it
"cheap."
He resolved his feelings into factors and simplified the form of each;
and this little mathematical operation showed that he was miserable for
three reasons.
The first was that there was no money for the tangent balance of the
Air-Motor, which was the final part, on which he had spent months of
hard work and a hundred more than half sleepless nights.
The second was that he had not seen his wife for nearly a year, and had
no idea how long it would be before he saw her again, and he was just
as much in love with her as he had been fourteen years ago, when he
married her.
The third, and not the least, was that Christmas was coming, and he did
not see how in the world he was to make a Christmas out
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