“I get very cross,” she frankly admitted: “and I want to throw things about the room!”
“When that happens to—to the people I have visited, they never act so. By a short and simple process—which I cannot explain to you—they store up the useless hours: and, on some other occasion, when they happen to need extra time, they get them out again!”
The Earl was listening with a slightly incredulous smile. “Why cannot you explain the process?” he enquired.
Mein Herr was ready with a quite unanswerable reason. “Because you have no words, in your language, to convey the ideas which are needed. I could explain it in—in—but you would not understand it!”
“No indeed!” said Lady Muriel, graciously dispensing with the name of the unknown language. “I never learnt it—at least, not to speak it fluently, you know. Please tell us some more wonderful things!”
“They run their railway-trains without any engines—nothing is needed but machinery to stop them with. Is that wonderful enough, Miladi?”
“But where does the force come from?” I ventured to ask.
Mein Herr turned quickly round, to look at the new speaker. Then he took off his spectacles, and polished them, and looked at me again, in evident bewilderment. I could see he was thinking—as indeed I was also—that we must have met before.
“They use the force of gravity,” he said. “It is a force known also in your country, I believe?”
“But that would need a railway going down-hill,” the Earl remarked. “You ca’n’t have all your railways going down-hill?”