XVII
LILLIAN and the Marselluses sailed for France early in May. The Professor, left alone, had plenty of time to spray his rosevines, and his garden had never been so beautiful as it was that June. After his university duties were over, he smuggled his bed and clothing back to the old house and settled down to a leisurely bachelor life. He realized that he ought to be getting to work. The garden, in which he sat all day, was no longer a valid excuse to keep him from his study. But the task that awaited him up there was difficult. It was a little thing, but one of those little things at which the hand becomes selfconscious, feels itself stiff and clumsy.
It was his plan to give part of this summer to Tom Outland’s diary—to edit and annotate it for publication. The bother was that he must write an introduction. The diary covered only about six months of the boy’s life, a summer he spent on the Blue Mesa, and in it there was almost nothing about Tom himself. To mean anything, it must be prefaced by a sketch of Outland, and some account of his later life and achievements. To write of his
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