"The King!" announced the President of the Dinner.
There was a movement and a rustle all round the great supper-room as the guests rose to the toast; another rustle as they reseated themselves. One of the celebrities whom Paul had pointed out to her began to speak upon the achievements of Wilbur Wright. At the table next to Gwenna some journalists bent absorbed over scribbling pads. Speech followed speech as the toasts were gone through. The opal-blue haze of cigarette smoke drifted up above the white tables with their rose-pink and ferny decorations. Chairs were pushed sidewards as guests turned alert and listening faces towards the head of the room; and every now and again the grave and concise and pleasantly modulated tones of some speaker-on-the-subject of his heart were broken in upon by a soft storm of applause.
"Colonel Conyers to speak now," murmured Paul to Gwenna, as the long, lean figure that had been sitting opposite to them rose. He stepped backwards, to stand against one of those gilded pillars as he made his speech, responding to the toast that had coupled his name with that of the Flying Wing of the Army.
Gwenna listened with even more breathless attention than she had paid to the other speakers.
Colonel Conyers spoke easily and lightly, as if he had been, not making a speech, but talking to a knot of friends at his house. He reviewed, in terms so simple that even the young girl at his table could follow all he said, the difficulties and the risks of aviation, and the steps that had been taken to minimise those risks. Wind, it seemed, had been in a great measure overcome. Risk from faulty workmanship of machines—that, too, was overcome. Workmanship was now well-nigh as perfect as it could be made.
Here Gwenna glowed with pride, exchanging a glance with her employer far down the tables. This meant their workmanship at Aircraft Factories; their Factory, too! This meant the labours of Mrs. Crewe and of Mr. Ryan, and of André, and of the workmen in overalls at the lathes in that noisy central shop. Even the brushful of dope that she, Gwenna, spread conscientiously over each seam of the great wings, played its tiny part in helping to preserve a Flyer's life!
The risk in stability, too, Colonel Conyers said, had been successfully combatted by the gyroscope. There remained, however, Fog and Darkness as the chief perils, which, at the present moment, of July, Nineteen-fourteen, our Airmen had to fight....
In the soldier's lean face that shrewd, half-mischievous smile was flickering as he spoke; his grey trim head turning now and again against the gilded column, his keen eyes fixed upon some objective of his own, his strong hand fidgeting in the small mechanical gesture of a man who is less accustomed to speaking about things than to doing them.
Gwenna thought how different, how entirely different were all these people here from that other dinner-party at the house of the prosperous and artistic Smiths who had found so much to say about the Russian Ballet!
Definitely now Gwenna saw what the chief difference between them was.