up here, fifty miles from a
telegraph post. Well, yesterday Blake was sneering at the whole affair.'

'What is this wireless machine? Explain it to me,' said Lady Bude.

'How can you be so cruel?' asked Merton.

'Why cruel?'

'Oh, you know very well how your sex receives explanations. You have
three ways of doing it.'

'Explain _them_!'

'Well, the first way is, if a man tries to explain what "per cent" means,
or the difference of "odds on," or "odds against," that is, if they don't
gamble, they cast their hands desperately abroad, and cry, "Oh, don't, I
never _can_ understand!" The second way is to sit and smile, and look
intelligent, and think of their dressmaker, or their children, or their
young man, and then to say, "Thank you, you have made it all so clear!"'

'And the third way?'

'The third way is for you to make it plain to the explainer that he does
not understand what he is explaining.'

'Well, try me; how does the wireless machine work?'

'Then, to begin with a simple example in ordinary life, you know what
telepathy is?'

'Of course, but tell me.'

'Suppose Jones is thinking of Smith, or rather of Smith's sister. Jones
is dying, or in a row, in India. Miss Smith is in Bayswater. She sees
Jones in her drawing-room. The thought of Jones has struck a receiver of
some sort in the brain, say, of Miss Smith. _But_ Miss Smith may not see
him, somebody else may, say her aunt, or the footman. That is because
the aunt or the footman has the properly tuned receiver in her or his
brain, and Miss Smith has not.'

'I see, so far--but the machine?'

'That is an electric apparatus charged with a message. The message is
not conducted by wires, but is merely carried along on a new sort of
waves, "Hertz waves," I think, but that does not matter. They roam
through space, these waves, and wherever they meet another machine of the
same kind, a receiver, they communicate it.'

'Then everybody who has such a machine as Mr. Macrae's gets all Mr.
Macrae's messages for nothing?' asked Lady Bude.

'They would get them,' said Merton. 'But that is where the artfulness
comes in. Two Italian magicians, or electricians, Messrs. Gianesi and
Giambresi, have invented an improvement suggested by a dodge of the
Indians on the Amazon River. They make machines which are only in tune
with each other. Their machine fires off a message which no other
machine can receive or tap except that of their customer, say Mr