He rubbed his hand over his stubbled chin, absent-mindedly.
“Where shall we go, when we migrate?” he asked, not unhappily.
She gazed with unseeing eyes through the window, out over the house-top.
“I know a little south of England village,” she said, in her soft, flute-like contralto, “I know a little village, nestling down among green hills, a little town of gardens and ivy and walls and thatches, in a country of brooks and hawthorn hedges—a little village where the nightingales sing at night, and the skylarks sing by day, and the old men and women have rosy faces, and the girls are shy and soft-spoken—”
“But we’d die of loneliness in that sort of place, wouldn’t we?”
“No, Jim, we should get more out of life than you dream. Then, in the winter, we could slip over to Paris and the Riviera, or down to Rome—it can be done cheaply, if one knows how—and before you realized it you would be used to the quiet and the change, and even learn to like it.”
“Yes,” he said wearily. “I’ve had too much of this wear-and-tear life—even though it has its thrill now and then. It’s intoxicating enough, but we’ve both had too much of this drinking wine out of a skull. Even at the best it’s feasting on a coffin-lid, isn’t it?”
She was still gazing out of the window with unseeing eyes.
“And there is so much to read, and study, and learn,” Durkin himself went on, more eagerly. “I might get a chance to work out my amplifier then, as I used to think I would, some day. If I could once get that sort of relay sensitive enough, and worked out the way I feel it can be worked out, you would be able to sit in Chicago and talk right through to London!”
“But how?” she asked.