"I laughed at you, madam," he said. "Before four hundred people. I said things to Mr. Oakes that I am ashamed of, and I came here today to ruin you. I shall not ask you to forgive me. I shall only tell you that I have written this morning to the Astronomer Royal to withdraw what I said of your work, and that if the Board does not engage you in your own name after this, I shall resign from it." He glanced along the bench at his nephew, and his heavy face worked for a moment. "And I shall tell you, too, that the Sylph is still not named. I believe Mr. Carrow will find, when he has thought about it, that a sea-officer who has the courage to tell the Board of Longitude it nearly drowned him is precisely the man for a survey."
He bowed again, and turned away, and went out of the theatre alone.
"Well," said Mr. Oakes, after a moment, to nobody in particular. "Well, I'm damned."
"Mr. Oakes!" said Mrs. Gage. And then, after a pause, in a quite different tone: "So, I think, am I."
* * *
Dr. Wray kept his word, and the Board kept Dr. Wray's. In May, at its quarterly meeting, the Board of Longitude resolved that Miss J. Penrose, of Lambeth, be engaged as a computer for the Nautical Almanac, at the usual rate, in her own name; and further resolved that the irregularity of her previous engagement be overlooked, in consideration of the uncommon accuracy of the work. It was the first time in forty years that the minutes of the Board recorded a woman's name. Mr. Oakes had the resolution copied out fair and framed, and hung it in the back room in Kennington over the coal box, where visitors could not avoid it.
The print came down from the window in St. James's Street. Another went up in its place, by the same hand: a lecture theatre, and a very large old man in a gown, on a stool, writing upon a black board, and a young woman in a bonnet below him, offering him a stick of chalk and a sugar plum. It was called Minerva Returns the Compliment, and it sold rather better than the first. Mrs. Gage bought two.
Sir Augustus's tables came out at last in September, corrected. Judith had worked through every one of the eleven thousand figures beyond ninety degrees herself, at the kitchen table in Lambeth, and found four more errors that had nothing to do with signs, and been paid for it handsomely. The preface was very short and very handsome too. It said that the author is indebted, for the detection of an error of principle in the third table, and for the examination of the whole, to Miss Judith Penrose; and Sir Augustus had refused, when the printer suggested it, to have the name altered to a Lady.