"She is remembering Clarence Isbister," he told himself in a flash.
She spoke quietly enough.
"Yes, I know what you mean by that atmospheric tension—a sort of awful, unspoken sense of disaster and yet nothing happening. Only everything is happening, inside, and everyone knows it without being able to define it."
"Give me a good honest earthquake," said Mark Easter.
"I'm with you, Mark," Julian agreed.
"A tangible misfortune is nothing, compared to those perfectly indefinable indications of disturbance on what I suppose we may call the mental plane."
"A thing you can't lay hold of," said Mark, translating into his own phraseology.
"Those are much the worst," Miss Marchrose repeated, with conviction. "Sometimes I wonder if, years and years hence, when things are very much more advanced, those weapons, belonging to what Sir Julian called the mental plane, will come to be the only ones used."
"It would simplify war."
"I wonder," said Julian. "Atmosphere is a powerful weapon."