“I’d like to read this to you, son,” she said, and he, not even asking for its name, because he thought to please her, nodded assent. It was a story with a peculiar title. “The Man Without a Country,” his mother said.
She commenced to read, and he lay with eyes closed, his attention not fixed. Presently he opened his eyes, and before half a dozen pages were read he was giving to the reading such attention as he had never given to any narrative before. His eyes did not leave his mother’s face, and there came into them a hungry, troubled look.... His mother’s face became dim, and he realized that he was seeing through a mist. Every word of that wonderful lesson, that text-book of patriotism, was reaching his mind as with rays of white light. At last she finished and looked down at him, and his cheeks were wet. She did not speak. It was he who spoke after a long silence.
“That’s the answer,” he said, and his mother, possessing that marvelous quality, intuition, went quietly out of the room.
It was not long before he was able to sit up. Two weeks past the second month of his confinement, he was well enough to be taken to his home, and there, in his own rooms, he demanded books. Not the books one might suppose, not books to pass the long hours of convalescence lightly, but treatises on the gas-engine, on carburetion, on ignition; highly specialized books on the aeroplane.
“I should think you’d had aeroplane enough,” his father said—a father who was now nearer to him by much than he had been before. “You’re not going to meddle with those things again, I hope.”
“Dad,” said Potter, slowly, “they’re the only thing I’m going to meddle with. They’re my business, and I haven’t any other business.... I’m going to be the man in the United States who knows more about aeroplanes and how to build them than anybody else.... And some day I’m going to build them.”
“Can’t make it a commercial success, son. Nothing in it. If you want to get into business seriously, why, when you’re strong enough, just drop around at the plant. I’ll give you all the business you want.”
“I’m not thinking about commercial success,” said Potter.
“What’s the big idea, then?” his father asked, jocularly.
“Do you believe we can keep out of this war?” Potter countered.