at in all this bunkum. _I_ feel like a man floundering in a
universe of soapsuds, up and downs, east and west. I can't stand it. I
must get my foot on something solid or--I don't know what."

I laughed at the consternation in his face.

"I mean it," I said. "I've been thinking it over. I've made up my mind.
It's no good arguing. I shall go in for work--real work. No! this isn't
work; it's only laborious cheating. But I've got an idea! It's an old
idea--I thought of years ago, but it came back to me. Look here! Why
should I fence about with you? I believe the time has come for flying to
be possible. Real flying!"

"Flying!"

I stuck to that, and it helped me through the worst time in my life.
My uncle, after some half-hearted resistance and a talk with my aunt,
behaved like the father of a spoilt son. He fixed up an arrangement that
gave me capital to play with, released me from too constant a solicitude
for the newer business developments--this was in what I may call the
later Moggs period of our enterprises--and I went to work at once with
grim intensity.

But I will tell of my soaring and flying machines in the proper place.
I've been leaving the story of my uncle altogether too long. I
wanted merely to tell how it was I took to this work. I took to these
experiments after I had sought something that Marion in some indefinable
way had seemed to promise. I toiled and forgot myself for a time, and
did many things. Science too has been something of an irresponsive
mistress since, though I've served her better than I served Marion. But
at the time Science, with her order, her inhuman distance, yet steely
certainties, saved me from despair.

Well, I have still to fly; but incidentally I have invented the lightest
engines in the world.

I am trying to tell of all the things that happened to me. It's hard
enough simply to get it put down in the remotest degree right. But this
is a novel, not a treatise. Don't imagine that I am coming presently
to any sort of solution of my difficulties. Here among my drawings and
hammerings NOW, I still question unanswering problems. All my life has
been at bottom, SEEKING, disbelieving always, dissatisfied always with
the thing seen and the thing believed, seeking something in toil, in
force, in danger, something whose name and nature I do not clearly
understand, something beautiful, worshipful, enduring, mine profoundly
and fundamentally, and the utter redemption of myself; I don't