In the course of the next six months the child of the ages became an
almost ordinary healthy baby, and Trafford began to think consecutively
about his scientific work again--in the intervals of effort of a more
immediately practical sort.
The recall of molecular physics and particularly of the internal
condition of colloids to something like their old importance in his life
was greatly accelerated by the fact that a young Oxford don named
Behrens was showing extraordinary energy in what had been for a time
Trafford's distinctive and undisputed field. Behrens was one of those
vividly clever energetic people who are the despair of originative men.
He had begun as Trafford's pupil and sedulous ape; he had gone on to
work that imitated Trafford's in everything except its continual
freshness, and now he was ransacking every scrap of suggestion to be
found in Trafford's work, and developing it with an intensity of
uninspired intelligence that most marvellously simulated originality. He
was already being noted as an authority; sometimes in an article his
name would be quoted and Trafford's omitted in relation to Trafford's
ideas, and in every way his emergence and the manner of his emergence
threatened and stimulated his model and master. A great effort had to be
made. Trafford revived the drooping spirits of Durgan by a renewed
punctuality in the laboratory. He began to stay away from home at night
and work late again, now, however, under no imperative inspiration, but
simply because it was only by such an invasion of the evening and night
that it would be possible to make headway against Behren's unremitting
industry. And this new demand upon Trafford's already strained mental
and nervous equipment began very speedily to have its effect upon his
domestic life.
It is only in romantic fiction that a man can work strenuously to the
limit of his power and come home to be sweet, sunny and entertaining.
Trafford's preoccupation involved a certain negligence of Marjorie, a
certain indisposition to be amused or interested by trifling things, a
certain irritability....