"Oh, I don't know about 'invent.' Call it an improvement. It should be about as different from the lumbering concern you saw me go up in to-day as that's different from—say from one of those old Cambrian Railway steam engines," he declared exultantly. "It's——"
Here, he plunged into another vortex of mysterious jargon about "automatic stability," about "skin friction," and a hundred other matters that left the listening girl as giddy as a flight itself might have done.
What she did understand from all this was that here, after all, in the Machine, must be the secret of all the magic. This was what interested the Man. An inventor, too, he talked as if he loved to talk of it—even to her; his steel-blue eyes holding her own. Perhaps he didn't even see her, she thought; perhaps he scarcely remembered there was a girl there, leaving strawberries and cream untasted on an apple-green plate, listening with all her ears, with all of herself—as he, with all of himself, guided a machine. Ah, he talked of a just-invented machine as in the same tone Gwenna had heard young mothers talk of their new-born babies.
This was what he lived for!
"Yes," concluded the enthusiast with a long sigh, "if I could get that completed, and upon the market——"
"Well?" Gwenna took up softly; ignorant, but following his every change of tone. "Why can't you?"
"Why not? For the usual reason that people who are keen to get things done can't do 'em," the boy said ruefully, watching that responsive shadow cloud her face as he told her. "It's a question of the dashed money."
"Oh!" said the girl more softly still. "I see."
So he, too, even he knew what it was to find that fettering want of guineas clog a soaring impulse? What a shame, she thought....
He thought (as many another young man with a Subject has thought of some rapt and girlish listener!) that the little thing was jolly intelligent, for a girl, more so than you were supposed to expect of such a pretty face—— Pretty? Come to look at her she was quite lovely. Made that baggage in the yellow dress and the Mrs. in the Pink look like a couple of half-artificial florists' blooms by the side of a lily-of-the-valley freshly-plucked from some country garden, sappy and sturdy, and sweet. And her skin was like the bit of mother-of-pearl she was wearing as a heart-shaped locket.