x^2 - 2x - 35 = 0
(x - 7) (X + 5) = 0
x = 7 or -5
She smiled straight into his eyes, sweetly and fearlessly. "Seven! Just
what you said! Oh, if I could only do them like you! I'm ever and ever
so much obliged, Mr. Queed--and now I can go to bed."
Mr. Queed avoided Fifi's smile; he obviously deliberated.
"If you have any more of these terrible difficulties," he said slowly,
"it isn't necessary for you to sit there all evening and cry over them.
You ... may ask me to show you."
"Oh, _could_ I really! Thank you ever so much. But no, I won't be here,
you see. I didn't mean to come to-night--truly, Mr. Queed--I know I
bother you _so_--only Mother made me."
"Your mother made you? Why?"
"Well--it's right cold upstairs, you know," said Fifi, gathering up her
books, "and she thought it might not be very good for my cough...."
Queed glanced impatiently at the girl's delicate face. A frown deepened
on his brow; he cleared his throat with annoyance.
"Oh, I am willing," he said testily, "for you to bring your work here
whenever it is very cold upstairs."
"Oh, how good you are, Mr. Queed!" cried Fifi, staggered by his
nobility. "But of course I can't think of bothering--"
"I should not have asked you," he interrupted her, irritably, "if I had
not been willing for you to come."
But for all boarders, their comfort and convenience, Fifi had the great
respect which all of us feel for the source of our livelihood; and,
stammering grateful thanks, she again assured him that she could not
make such a nuisance of herself. However, of course Mr. Queed had his
way, as he always did.
This point definitely settled, he picked up his pencil, which was his
way of saying, "And now, for heaven's sake--good-night!" But Fifi, her
heart much softened toward him, stood her ground, the pile of
school-books tucked under her arm.
"Mr. Queed--I--wonder if you won't let me get something to put on your
forehead? That bruise is so dreadful--"
"Oh, no! No! It's of no consequence whatever."
"But I don't think you can have noticed how bad it is. Please let me,
Mr. Queed. Just a little dab of arnica or witch-hazel--"
"My forehead does very well as it is, I assure you."
Fifi turned reluctantly. "Indeed something on it would make it get well
so _much_ faster. I wish you would--"
Ah! There was a thought. As long as he had this bruise people would be
bothering him about it. It was a world where a man couldn't even get a
black eye without a thousand busybodies commenting on it.
"If you are certain that its healing will be hastened--"
"Positive!" cried Fifi happily, and vanished without more speech.
One Hour a Day to be given to Bodily Exercise.... How long, O Lord, how
long!
Fifi returned directly with white cloths, scissors, and two large
bottles.
"I won't take hardly a minute--you see! Listen, Mr. Queed. One of these
bottles heals fairly well and doesn't hurt at all worth mentioning.
That's witch-hazel. The other heals very well and fast, but
stings--well, a lot; and that's turpentine. Which will you take?"
"The turpentine," said Mr. Queed in a martyr's voice.
Fifi's hands were very deft. In less than no time, she made a little
lint pad, soaked it in the pungent turpentine, applied it to the
unsightly swelling, and bound it firmly to the young man's head with a
snowy band. In all of Mr. Queed's life, this was the first time that a
woman had ministered to him. To himself, he involuntarily confessed that
the touch of the girl's hands upon his forehead was not so annoying as
you might have expected.
Fifi drew off and surveyed her work sympathetically yet professionally.
The effect of the white cloth riding aslant over the round glasses and
academic countenance was wonderfully rakish and devil-may-care.
"Do you feel the sting much so far?"
"A trifle," said the Doctor.
"It works up fast to a kind of--climax, as I remember, and then slowly
dies away. The climax will be pretty bad--I'm so sorry! But when it's at
its worst just say to yourself, 'This is doing me lots and lots of
good,' and then you won't mind so much."
"I will follow the directions," said he, squirming in his chair.
"Thank you for letting me do it, and for the algebra, and--good-night."
"Good-night."
He immediately abandoned all pretense of working. To him it seemed that
the climax of the turpentine had come instantly; there was no more
working up about it than there was about a live red coal. The mordant
tooth bit into his blood; he rose and tramped the floor, muttering
savagely to himself. But he would not pluck the hateful thing off, no,
no--for that would have been an admission that he was wrong in putting
it on; and he was never wrong.
So Bylash, reading one of Miss Jibby's works in the parlor, and pausing
for a drink of water at the end of a glorious chapter, found him
tramping and muttering. His flying look dared Bylash to address him, and
Bylash prudently took the dare. But he poured his drink slowly, stealing
curious glances and endeavoring to catch the drift of the little
Doctor's murmurings.
In this attempt he utterly failed, because why? Obviously because the
Doctor cursed exclusively in the Greek and Latin languages.
In five minutes, Queed was upon his work again. Not that the turpentine
was yet dying slowly away, as Fifi had predicted that it would. On the
contrary it burned like the fiery furnace of Shadrach and Abednego. But
_One Hour a Day to be given to Bodily Exercise!_... Oh, every second
must be made to count now, whether one's head was breaking into flame or
not.
Whatever his faults or foibles, Mr. Queed was captain of his soul. But
the fates were against him to-night. In half an hour, when the
sting--they called this conflagration a sting!--was beginning to get
endurable and the pencil to move steadily, the door opened and in strode
Professor Nicolovius; he, it seemed, wanted matches. Why under heaven,
if a man wanted matches, couldn't he buy a thousand boxes and store them
in piles in his room?
The old professor apologized blandly for his intrusion, but seemed in no
hurry to make the obvious reparation. He drew a match along the bottom
of the mantle-shelf, eyeing the back of the little Doctor's head as he
did so, and slowly lit a cigar.
"I'm sorry to see that you've met with an accident, Mr. Queed. Is there
anything, perhaps, that I might do?"
"Nothing at all, thanks," said Queed, so indignantly that Nicolovius
dropped the subject at once.
The star-boarder of Mrs. Paynter's might have been fifty-five or he
might have been seventy, and his clothes had long been the secret envy
of Mr. Bylash. He leaned against the mantel at his ease, blowing blue
smoke.
"You find this a fairly pleasant place to sit of an evening, I daresay!"
he purred, presently.
The back of the young man's head was uncompromisingly stern. "I might as
well try to write in the middle of Centre Street."
"So?" said Nicolovius, not catching his drift. "I should have thought
that--"
"The interruptions," said Queed, "are constant."
The old professor laughed. "Upon my word, I don't blame you for saying
that. The gross communism of a boarding-house ... it does gall one at
times! So far as I am concerned, I relieve you of it at once.
Good-night."
The afternoon before Nicolovius had happened to walk part of the way
downtown with Mr. Queed, and had been favored with a fair amount of his
stately conversation. He shut the door now somewhat puzzled by the young
man's marked curtness; but then Nicolovius knew nothing about the
turpentine.
The broken evening wore on, with progress slower than the laborer's in
Problem 71, when he decided to build two rods less a day. At eleven,
Miss Miller, who had been to the theatre, breezed in; she wanted a drink
of water. At 11.45--Queed's open watch kept accurate tally--there came
Trainer Klinker, who, having sought his pupil vainly in the Scriptorium,
retraced his steps to rout him out below. At sight of the tall bottle in
Klinker's hand Queed shrank, fearing that Fifi had sent him with a
second dose of turpentine. But the bottle turned out to contain merely a
rare unguent just obtained by Klinker from his friend Smithy, the
physical instructor at the Y.M.C.A., and deemed surprisingly effective
for the development of the academic bicep.
At last there was blessed quiet, and he could write again. The city
slept; the last boarder was abed; the turpentine had become a peace out
of pain; only the ticking of the clock filtered into the perfect calm of
the dining-room. The little Doctor of Mrs. Paynter's stood face to face
with his love, embraced his heart's desire. He looked into the heart of
Science and she gave freely to her lord and master. Sprawled there over
the Turkey-red cloth, which was not unhaunted by the ghosts of dead
dinners, he became chastely and divinely happy. His mind floated away
into the empyrean; he saw visions of a far more perfect Society; dreamed
dreams of the ascending spiral whose law others had groped at, but he
would be the first to formulate; caught and fondled the secret of the
whole great Design; reduced it to a rule-of-thumb to do his bidding;
bestrode the whole world like a great Colossus....
From which flight he descended with a thud to observe that it was
quarter of two o'clock, and the dining-room was cold with the dying down
of the Latrobe, and the excellent reading-lamp in the death-throes of
going out.
He went upstairs in the dark, annoyed with himself for having overstayed
his bedtime. Long experimentation had shown him that the minimum of
sleep he could get along with to advantage was six and one-half hours
nightly. This meant bed at 1.30 exactly, and he hardly varied it five
minutes in a year. To his marrow he was systematic; he was as definite
as an adding-machine, as practical as a cash register. But even now, on
this exceptional night, he did not go straight to bed. Something still
remained to be accomplished: an outrage upon his sacred Schedule.
In the first halcyon days at Mrs. Paynter's, before the board question
ever came up at all, the iron-clad Schedule of Hours under which he was
composing his great work had stood like this:
8.20 Breakfast
8.40 Evolutionary Sociology
1.30 Dinner
2 Evolutionary Sociology
7 Supper
7.20 to 1.30 Evolutionary Sociology
But the course of true love never yet ran smooth, and this schedule was
too ideal to stand. First the _Post_ had come along and nicked a clean
hour out of it, and now his Body had unexpectedly risen and claimed yet
another hour. And, beyond even this ... some devilish whim had betrayed
him to-night into offering his time for the service and uses of the
landlady's daughter in the puling matter of algebra.
No ... _no!_ He would not put that in. The girl could not be so selfish
as to take advantage of his over-generous impulse. She _must_ understand
that his time belonged to the ages and the race, not to the momentary
perplexities of a high school dunce.... At the worst it would be only
five minutes here and there--say ten minutes a week; forty minutes a
month. No, no! He would not put that in.
But the hour of Bodily Exercise could not be so evaded. It must go in.
On land or sea there was no help for that. For thirty days henceforward
at the least--and a voice within him whispered that it would be for much
longer--his Schedule must stand like this:
8.20 Breakfast
8.40 Evolutionary Sociology
1.30 Dinner
2 Evolutionary Sociology
4.45 to 5.15 Open-Air Pedestrianism
5.15 to 6.15 The _Post_
6.15 to 6.45 Klinker's Exercises for all Parts of the Body
7 Supper
7.20 Evolutionary Sociology
Hand clasped in his hair, Queed stared long at this wreckage with a
sense of foreboding and utter despondency. Doubtless Mr. Pat, who was at
that moment peacefully pulling a pipe over his last galleys at the
_Post_ office, would have been astonished to learn what havoc his
accursed fleas had wrought with the just expectations of posterity.