Besides, so fine a resolve as Vivie's,
to live on the heights must be respected.
At the same time, it is certain that for the next three months he
muddled his experiments, confused his arguments, lost his temper
with a colleague on the Council of the Zoological Society, kicked
the pugs--even caused the most unbearable two of them to be poisoned
by his assistant--and lied in attributing their deaths to other
causes. He promised the weeping Linda a Pom instead; he said "Hell!"
when the macaw interrupted them with raucous screams. He let pass
all sorts of misprints in his article on the Ductless Glands for the
_Encyclopaedia Scotica_, he was always losing the thread of his
discourse in his lectures at the London Institution and University
College; and he spent too much of his valuable time writing hugely
long letters on all sorts of subjects to David Williams.
David--or Vivie--replied much more laconically. In the first place
he--she--had had her say in the one big outpouring from which I
have quoted so freely; in the second she did not wish to stoke up
these fires lest they should become volcanic and break up a happy
home and a great career. She wrote once saying: "If ever you were in
trouble of any kind; if Linda should die before me, for example, I
would come back to you from the ends of the earth and even if I were
legitimately married to the Prince of Monaco; come back and serve
you as a drudge, as a butt for your wit, as a sick nurse.
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