discovery which he hoped would make his name immortal in the scientific
world. He discovered, on a rubbish heap, outside the gates of Stockholm,
a new kind of goose-foot with curved hairs on the usually straight-haired
calyx. He was in communication with the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and
the latter was even now considering the advisability of including the new
variety in the "Flora Germanica"; he was daily expecting to hear whether
or not the Academy had decided to immortalise his name by calling the
plant Chenopodium Wennerstroemianium. At his wife's death-bed he was
absentminded, almost unkind, for he had just received an answer in the
affirmative, and he fretted because neither he nor his wife could enjoy
the great news. She thought only of heaven and her children. He could not
help realising that to talk to her now of a calyx with curved hairs would
be the height of absurdity; but, he justified himself, it was not so
much a question of a calyx with straight or curved hairs, as of a
scientific discovery; and, more than that, it was a question of his
future and the future of his children, for their father's distinction
meant bread for them.

When his wife died on the following evening, he cried bitterly; he had
not shed a tear for many years. He was tortured by remorse, remembered
even the tiniest wrong he had ever done her, for he had been, on the
whole, an exemplary husband; his indifference, his absent-mindedness
of the previous day, filled him with shame and regret, and in a moment
of blankness he realised all the pettishness and selfishness of his
science which, he had imagined, was benefiting mankind. But these
emotions were short-lived; if you open a door with a spring behind it,
it will close again immediately. On the following morning, after he
had drawn up an announcement of her death for the papers, he wrote a
letter of thanks to the Berlin Academy of Sciences. After that he
resumed his work.