“Daddy, you talk as if I were a movie. But some day, when our ship comes in, we’ll go and see a better show than that. I’m dying to see radium in a spinthariscope. It has simply changed the world.”
“Wasn’t the world wonderful enough without it?”
“Yes, but you can’t prevent such things from being discovered.”
The old man meditatively buttered his toast, and nodded.
“I couldn’t, for instance, prevent a certain young man from discovering my daughter.”
Silence.
“Jean, darling, once you asked me why I was so late in discovering your mother. I am willing to tell you now. I was blinded by the fear of Nemesis for what I had done in the war.”
Jean quietly set down her teacup.
“Father, have you never felt that Nemesis overtook you?”
“No, I killed men for an abstraction, but an abstraction is the only thing a man can be sure of. In a world so dream-like that even one’s daughter eludes one, there is nothing to tie to except ideas. Horatio died for an idea. I will not blame myself that my boy acted in good faith.”