"In the foreground sat a stenographer, ready to record her words. Would she speak of her husband? Would she thank the Minister and the public? No, she began quite simply as follows: "'When we consider the progress made by the theories of radio-activity since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century--' The important thing to this great woman is work. Time should not be wasted in idle words. And so, dispensing with all superficial formality, with no betrayal of the tremendous emotion which all but overcame her--except by the extreme pallor of her face and the trembling of her lips--she continued her lecture in clear, well-modulated tones. "It was typical of this great soul that she should carry on their work courageously and without faltering. "You will see," concluded Lauzanne, "it is useless to try to interrupt her work for interviews." Later I met one of Madame Curie's fellow scientists who sympathized with my desire, but who agreed with Lauzanne that an interview was impossible. Finally, however, he promised to carry a letter to Madame Curie. I wrote ten letters and destroyed them. In one I said: "My father, who was a medical man, wrote: 'It is impossible to exaggerate the unimportance of people.' But you have been important to me for twenty years, and I want to see you a few minutes." The answer came within an hour. I was to go to the laboratory the next morning. I had been in Mr. Edison's laboratory a few weeks before sailing from home. Edison is rich in the material things--as he should be. Every kind of equipment is at his command. He is a power in the financial as well as the scientific world. In my childhood I had lived near Alexander Graham Bell; had admired his great house and his fine horses. A short time before, I had been in Pittsburgh, where the sky is plumed by the tall smoke stacks of the greatest radium reduction plants in the world. I remembered that millions of dollars had been spent on radium watches and radium gun sights. Several millions of dollars' worth of radium was even then stored in various parts of the United States. I had been prepared to meet a woman of the world, enriched by her own efforts and established in one of the white palaces of the Champs d'Elysées or some other beautiful boulevard of Paris. I found a simple woman, working in an inadequate laboratory and living in a simple apartment on the meager pay of a French professor. As I entered the new building at Number One Rue Pierre Curie, which stands out conspicuously among the old walls of the University of Paris, I had already formed a picture of the laboratory of the discoverer of radium. I waited a few minutes in the bare little office which might have been furnished from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Then the door opened and I saw a pale, timid little woman in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I had ever looked upon.