"'Mr. Sherbrand' ..." Patrine repeated rather vaguely. "Sherbrand" had somehow a ring that was familiar. Bawne explained:
"He's a great friend of Father's. He's splendid. A regularly topping chap!"
"And you've actually flown?"
"I've flewed—and I mean to go on with it." He repeated the assurance more sedately: "It's the profession I have chosen. They say you've got to begin young. And my legs wobbled and the ground rocked a bit when I got down on it. But I wasn't air-sick at all."
"Air-sick.... Are people...?"
Bawne said from the pedestal of superior knowledge:
"Oh, aren't they just, like anything! The Calais-Dover steamer-crossing's nothing to it sometimes—the Instructor told me."
Patrine laughed. The latest circulating-library novel, Love in the Clouds, had omitted to mention this fact. The heroine had donned an aviator's cap and pneumatic jacket, and "leapt nimbly on board" the aëroplane in half a gale of wind. As the machine dipped and rose gracefully upon the heaving element that cradled it, Enid had experienced merely a delicious exhilaration. Then a crisp moustache had brushed her rosy ear. The voice of Hubert, attuned to deepest melody of passion, had murmured in the shell-like organ of hearing: "Little girl. At last I have you! ... Mine, mine, my bride of the swan-path!—mine for ever and aye!"
Bawne continued, innocently discounting further statements on the part of the author of Love in the Clouds:
"He told me before we went up, you know. Of course, when you're flying you can't hear anything but the racket of the propeller. It goes roaring through you till your bones buzz, and the very ends of your teeth hum. So the other man has to yell at you through a trumpet, or write to you on bits of paper, unless he's switched off the engine for diving, and then you don't feel like talking—that's if you're a beginner, you know.... But man alive! it's splendid. You must try it, Pat!"