* * *
"You will sit still," murmured Mrs. Gage, without turning her head.
"Aunt, he has the wrong sign."
"I do not care if he has the wrong hat. Sit still."
Sir Augustus had finished his example. The true distance stood at the foot of the board, underlined twice. He was speaking now of the printer, and of the convenience of the octavo form for use at sea, and of the gratifying interest which certain gentlemen at the Admiralty had been pleased to show; and from these he passed, with practised ease, to the question of whether any gentleman present would care to put a question.
Several gentlemen did. One asked about the cost of the volume, and one about the method's use with the sun instead of a star, and one, an elderly clergyman, made a short speech about the Almighty's evident care for the mariner in setting the moon so conveniently in the sky. Sir Augustus answered them all with grace. Judith sat with her pencil inside her glove, and her heart going very fast, and argued with herself.
She was a woman, and four-and-twenty, and not even properly entitled to her seat. Ladies did not put questions at the Institution. They were, by long and amiable custom, ornaments. If she rose she would be laughed at, and her aunt would be mortified, and the cousin whose husband had the gout would never send a ticket again. And she might be wrong. It was possible to be wrong. It was possible that there was some convention in his tables, explained in a preface she had not read, that the third correction was to be taken as positive and the sign applied elsewhere. She did not think so. She had watched him apply the first two signs at the board with his own hand. There was nothing in the method that would carry the sign of the third except the table, and the table had carried it wrong.
And Sir Augustus Threlkeld had told four hundred people that it wanted only to be looked out, and added; and the Admiralty were interested.
"If there are no further questions," said the President of the Institution, half rising from his chair.
Judith stood up.
It was not, she found, at all difficult. Her knees, which she had expected to fail her, held her up perfectly well. It was only that the theatre seemed to have become, all at once, very much larger, and that four hundred faces were turning towards her one after another, like the pages of a book being riffled by a thumb.