and received many letters every day, though not as many as he sent out.
Much of their conversation was about charlatans and idiots who held ridiculous notions. All these notions were much the same to her, since she didn’t hold any scientific ideas at all beyond those of Jules Verne. For example, there was the metric system. Little did she know that, whereas in Missouri and even California people spoke of pints and pounds and rods and bushels and pecks, in France people spoke of grams and meters and centimeters, which were all scientifically related to the circumference of the earth. Germany had been a measurement madhouse before 1870, according to Andrew, with every town measuring its own ells, and the Meile different in Baden from what it was in Bavaria, and that didn’t even begin to take into account the Wegstunde, the Klafter, and the Zoll, which was an inch, more or less. Andrew could not forgive the British Parliament for voting, in a “demented medieval manner,” to decline to put the British Empire on the metric system. Margaret mentioned this to Mrs. Lear, who said, “Oh, my dear. That is marriage. As far as Captain Lear is concerned, the navy is riddled top to bottom with fools who were promoted for no apparent reason. But it could be worse—it could be the Royal Navy!” She laughed. “Better for them to air their complaints than take to drink over them!”
Andrew talked endlessly about the universe.
First, she had to be educated about everything that was known about the universe, such as the rate of acceleration for falling bodies, and laws of thermodynamics. Entropy was a concept that she grasped instantly. When he was explaining it to her, she imagined herself, first, busily cleaning house and cutting up a ham hock for baked beans, then, as a result of entropy, lying on a sofa and reading Rhoda Broughton. She didn’t have too much trouble, either, with Newton’s ideas about gravitation or his three laws of motion, except for the third one. Her life experience seemed to indicate that if you weren’t careful, often the reaction was stronger than the original action, not equal to it. Against Mr. Newton’s “equal and opposite reaction,” she suggested “sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.” Andrew laughed as if she were making a joke when she said this, and kissed her on the cheek.
Once he felt that she had a rudimentary understanding of the universe, he explained to her how he had changed its nature by identifying a multitude of double stars. These were two suns orbiting each other, rather like a couple spinning in the middle of a dance floor. However, he was not swinging her about—together, they were describing the circle. Andrew had found 246 of these doubles, of which 103 were confirmed by others and another thirteen were provisionally accepted. However, the remaining 130 were not accepted by certain men who were temporarily influential in the world of astronomy. The doubters would soon yield. “Herschel figured out that the solar system is moving through space, toward the constellation of Hercules, and it took fifty-four years for him to be proved correct.” Andrew often spoke of Herschel, and with such fondness that it took Margaret several months to understand that Sir William had died in 1822, some forty-five years before Andrew himself was born. Andrew laughed his cheerful rumble. It was Herschel who discovered Uranus, along with the satellites Titania and Oberon; it was he who believed that Earth was not the only inhabited planet; it was he who named the asteroid; it was he who discovered the existence of infrared radiation; it was he who made many of the telescopes in use in England; it was he who would have ratified Andrew’s own discoveries, if only he had lived to see them. Double stars had once, Andrew told her, been hurtling about space as the sun does, solitary, accompanied only by random satellites, but these stars had exerted a pull on each other in passing and captured each other.
Margaret’s letters to Lavinia were long and cheerful. She listed all the new things she was doing and thinking about. Lavinia usually wrote with her own news, but once she said, “Andrew is an unusual man. I, for one, never doubted that you would rise to the occasion. And in even the most ordinary marriages, Margaret, there are plenty of occasions to rise to.”
Andrew did not bother to celebrate Christmas, so Mrs. Lear asked her if