“Make it thirty.”
“Well, thirty. Mind you, you will be able to put stoves in all the bedrooms, and you will be able to run machinery for pumping water, for cleaning harness, for churning, for brushing your hair, if you wish for it.”
“I don’t wish for it for brushing my hair, but I do for everything else. Is this a dream of yours, my girl, or have you been reading a pictorial advertisement?”
“I went into the question two years ago, hoping that we might be able to introduce electric power on the farm; but unhappily we have no stream of water to work the dynamo and it would not pay to use coal; we might as well use the coal energy direct. I went so far into the matter as to visit a place where a private installation had been made, and my eyes were opened.”
He gazed at her admiringly in silence for some time. Then he cried:
“Great Gloriana! You are a bit of a wonder, Priscilla! You carry me off my feet; and the worst of it is that I feel I must do everything that you suggest. If I try to look the other way I see something that sends me back to you. I’m like the master mariner whose adventures worried us at school—in trying to avoid what’s its name, he fell on the other—you know.”
“Scylla and Charybdis?”
“That’s it—Scylla—in my case, Priscilla and Charybdis. Priscilla and Charybdis—that’s how I am. But by the living shrimp, you’re a wonder! Where can I get any books that will go into the business? I suppose the dynamo people are those to apply to in the first place. But I know nothing worth talking about of electricity.”
“What is there to know about such a simple adaptation of it as is necessary for our purpose? I assure you that the sparking of your motor is a thousand times more complicated, and you know all about that. Long ago people thought that to be an electrical engineer enough to light up a house required years of training, and people’s sons were to become electrical engineers instead of being doctors or lawyers; but now they are only something between plumbers and gasfitters. Isn’t that so?”
“By the living shrimp! we’ll have the whole place in a blaze before the winter,” She lay back and laughed at his enthusiasm and the unfortunate way in which it led him to prophesy.