"The colour of a bath sponge," he said, and she pretended despair.
"Oh dear! And I really thought I had seen the dawning of poetry in you,
Ray."
"Merely reflected from yourself, Chicky. Still I'm improving. The turbine has a poetic side, don't you think?"
"I suppose it has. Science is poetic—at any rate, the history of science is full of poetry—if you know what poetry means."
"I wish I had more time for such things," he said. "Perhaps I shall have some day. To be in trade is rather deadening though. There seems so little to show for all my activities—only hundreds of thousands of miles of string. In weak moments I sometimes ask myself if, after all, it is good enough."
"They must be very weak moments, indeed," said Estelle. "Perhaps you'll tell me how the world could get on without string?"
"I don't know. But you, with all your love of beautiful things, ought to understand me instead of jumping on me. What is beauty? No two people feel the same about it, surely? You'd say a poem was beautiful; I'd say a square cut for four, just out of reach of cover point, was beautiful. Your father would say, a book on shooting high pheasants was beautiful, if he agreed with it; John Best would say a good sample of shop twine was beautiful."
"We should all be right, beauty is in all those things. I can see that. I can even see that shooting birds with great skill, as father does, is beautiful—not the slaughter of the bird, which can't be beautiful, but the way it's done. But those are small things. With the workers you want to begin at the beginning and show them—what Mister Best knows—that the beauty of the thing they make depends on it being well and truly made."
"They're restless."
"Yes; they're reaching out for more happiness, like everybody else."