He saw the mothers who sighed for freedom, resenting the nursery.
He saw the Anything, wedded to the Anything But.
Yes; he saw for that moment nothing but the wholesale gigantic Blunder of the mis-mating of the world.
No doubt it was all crystallized for him in one tender image; Olwen's dead mother, the girl he should have married. He sighed and smiled.
"Pity there's no putting things right, as that lunatic suggests," he thought. "There would be an invention worth boasting about! Wireless wouldn't be in it, or X-rays. Pity it isn't all true...."
A tap at the door interrupted his musings. The softest of girl's voices asked, "Are you ready for me, Uncle?"
"Yes!" he called out, jerking himself back into the world of realities. "Come in, Olwen."
Olwen Howel-Jones came in.
A small, but daintily made girl of nineteen. Just a handful of softness in a skimpy one-piece frock. A pale, three-cornered morsel of a face set off by sleek hair as black as her little French boots. Large eyes that seemed sometimes brown, sometimes grey; a mouth tremulous, but vivid as a red carnation—such was Olwen. She brought a ripple of Youth into that bare temple of Science that was her uncle's study. Something else she brought—a breath of tension, of impatience. A man would have passed it over; not so a woman. Already one woman in the hotel had said to herself, "I wonder who it is that child's so desperately in love with?"