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.

On the day of publication, the Professor had withdrawn to his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