I was waiting up in the kitchen; I saw him; he wept; he is in trouble.

Here's the famous month of July when the sun is able to enrich us all, and if you only would--" "Enough," said Marguerite, divining the thoughts that must have assailed her father's mind.
A phenomenon which often takes possession of persons leading sedentary lives had seized upon Balthazar; his life depended, so to speak, on the places with which it was identified; his thought was so wedded to his laboratory and to the house he lived in that both were indispensable to him,--just as the Bourse becomes a necessity to a stock-gambler, to whom the public holidays are so much lost time.

Here were his hopes; here the heavens contained the only atmosphere in which his lungs could breathe the breath of life.

This alliance of places and things with men, which is so powerful in feeble natures, becomes almost tyrannical in men of science and students.

To leave his house was, for Balthazar, to renounce Science, to abandon the Problem,--it was death.
Marguerite was a prey to anxiety until the breakfast hour.