From the diary of Helen P. Galt, second-year graduate student in chemistry, Walnut College, Oregon. Hardcover, marbled boards, 1957 calendar pasted in the front. Entries in blue fountain pen, sparse, dated.
Friday, the 4th of October, 1957 — late evening, at the rooming-house.
Spent the better part of today on the carrot column, the last of three trials. The runs match to within five percent on retention time across all three, and Dr. Morley will be glad. He told me on Wednesday morning before he caught the train to Portland that if the third trial agreed with the first two we were looking at something worth talking about Monday. I am looking at it. It is something worth talking about Monday. The orange band on the third column came down at the same minute and a half between the eighteenth and the nineteenth elution — which means it is one substance, not two. Which means Roger's beet column with the same band must be the same substance. Which means Roger's beet column with the same band cannot also be a new anthocyanin congener. The band is, by the column's own arithmetic, a carotenoid the beet picked up from a contaminating root vegetable in the field, or from a bleeding in his own column, or from somewhere else entirely. It is, in any case, not what Roger has been telling us it is for eighteen months.
I am not going to write that sentence on Monday in front of Roger. I will write it on a chalkboard, in my own hand, slowly, with the column data in three columns and a single value at the foot of the right-hand column that is the same as the value at the foot of the left, and the room will see what I have seen.
Roger came into the lab at four this afternoon as I was finishing the column writeup. He asked if I had time tomorrow to go over what we know together. I told him I was going to spend tomorrow walking with my sister's old roommate Joyce, who is here from Eugene for the weekend. He said Sunday, then. I said I would see how the walk went. He said something about how the seminar would be richer if we get into the room having compared notes. I told him I had been comparing notes for weeks, and that the comparison was what I would be putting up. He went down to his own bench.
The notebook is in the right-hand drawer of my desk, second from the top. I did not lock it. I have never locked it. Roger has a key to the lab in any case — every fourth-year does — and a locked drawer is the sort of thing that says louder than the column does. I am not afraid of Roger. I am simply going to be in the room on Monday with three columns and one number at the foot of the right-hand column.
Joyce is downstairs. I am going to bed.
— H.G.