What remained to be done was to construct such a machine and find out how the electric current could best be brought into harness.
Then, as though Fortune suddenly felt that he was winning this stupendous success too easily, Bell was flung back by an avalanche of troubles.

Sanders and Hubbard, who had been paying the cost of his experiments, abruptly announced that they would pay no more unless he confined his attention to the musical telegraph, and stopped wasting his time on ear-toys that never could be of any financial value.

What these two men asked could scarcely be denied, as one of them was his best-paying patron and the other was the father of the girl whom he hoped to marry.

"If you wish my daughter," said Hubbard, "you must abandon your foolish telephone." Bell's "School of Vocal Physiology," too, from which he had hoped so much, had come to an inglorious end.
He had been too much absorbed in his experiments to sustain it.

His professorship had been given up, and he had no pupils except Georgie Sanders and Mabel Hubbard.