Close's room. Such a thing could never
have been concealed. The alternative? Radium! Ah! that was different.
I determined on an experiment. Mrs. Close's maid was prevailed on to
sleep in her mistress's room. Of course radiations of brief duration
would do her no permanent harm, although they would produce their
effect, nevertheless. In one night the maid became extremely nervous.
If she had stayed under them several nights no doubt the beginning of
a dermatitis would have affected her, if not more serious trouble. A
systematic application, covering weeks and months, might in the end
even have led to death.
"The next day I managed, as I have said, to go over the room
thoroughly with a vacuum cleaner--a new one of my own which I had
bought myself. But tests of the dust which I got from the floors,
curtains, and furniture showed nothing at all. As a last thought I
had, however, cleaned the mattress of the bed and the cracks and
crevices in the brass bars. Teats of that dust showed it to be
extremely radioactive. I had the dust dissolved, by a chemist who
understands that sort of thing, recrystallized, and the radium salts
were extracted from the refuse. Thus I found that I had recovered
all but a very few milligrams of the radium that had been originally
purchased in London. Here it is in this deadly tube in the leaden
casket.
"It is needless to add that the night after I had cleaned out this
deadly element the maid slept the sleep of the just--and would have
been all right when next I saw her but for the interference of the
unjust on whom I had stolen a march.
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