of a family and the daily drudgery of
a printer's business, which requires such minute, painstaking care; and
soar, with the enthusiasm and intoxication of the man of science, into
the regions of the unknown in quest of a secret which daily eludes the
most subtle experiment? And the inventor, alas! as will shortly be seen,
has plenty of woes to endure, besides the ingratitude of the many; idle
folk that can do nothing themselves tell them, "Such a one is a born
inventor; he could not do otherwise. He no more deserves credit for his
invention than a prince for being born to rule! He is simply exercising
his natural faculties, and his work is its own reward," and the people
believe them.

Marriage brings profound mental and physical perturbations into a
girl's life; and if she marries under the ordinary conditions of
lower middle-class life, she must moreover begin to study totally new
interests and initiate herself in the intricacies of business. With
marriage, therefore, she enters upon a phase of her existence when she
is necessarily on the watch before she can act. Unfortunately, David's
love for his wife retarded this training; he dared not tell her the
real state of affairs on the day after their wedding, nor for some time
afterwards. His father's avarice condemned him to the most grinding
poverty, but he could not bring himself to spoil the honeymoon by
beginning his wife's commercial education and prosaic apprenticeship to
his laborious craft. So it came to pass that housekeeping, no less than
working expenses, ate up the thousand francs, his whole fortune. For
four months David gave no thought to the future, and his wife remained
in ignorance. The awakening was terrible! Postel's bill fell due; there
was no money to meet it, and Eve knew enough of the debt and its cause
to give up her bridal trinkets and silver.

That evening Eve tried to induce David to talk of their affairs, for she
had noticed that he was giving less attention to the business and more
to the problem of which he had once spoken to her. Since the first few
weeks of married life, in fact, David spent most of his time in the
shed in the backyard, in the little room where he was wont to mould his
ink-rollers. Three months after his return to Angouleme, he had replaced
the old fashioned round ink-balls by rollers made of strong glue and
treacle, and an ink-table, on which the ink was evenly distributed, an
improvement so obvious that Cointet Broth