“Now you tell me of it,” she said with
a smile, “I do.”
“But before—?”
“No. You’ve made it clear. It
wasn’t clear before.”
“I’ve been talking of this sort of thing
with my friend Dr. Martineau. And I’ve
been thinking as well as talking. That perhaps
is why I’m so clear and positive.”
“I don’t complain that you are clear and
positive. I’ve been coming along the same
way.... It’s refreshing to meet you.”
“I found it refreshing to meet Martineau.”
A twinge of conscience about Dr. Martineau turned
Sir Richmond into a new channel. “He’s
a most interesting man,” he said. “Rather
shy in some respects. Devoted to his work.
And he’s writing a book which has saturated him
in these ideas. Only two nights ago we stood
here and talked about it. The Psychology of a
New Age. The world, he believes, is entering upon
a new phase in its history, the adolescence, so to
speak, of mankind. It is an idea that seizes
the imagination. There is a flow of new ideas
abroad, he thinks, widening realizations, unprecedented
hopes and fears. There is a consciousness of
new powers and new responsibilities. We are sharing
the adolescence of our race. It is giving history
a new and more intimate meaning for us. It is
bringing us into directer relation with public affairs,—making
them matter as formerly they didn’t seem to matter.
That idea of the bright little private life has to
go by the board.”
“I suppose it has,” she said, meditatively,
as though she had been thinking over some such question
before.
“The private life,” she said, “has
a way of coming aboard again.”
Her reflections travelled fast and broke out now far
ahead of him.
“You have some sort of work cut out for you,”
she said abruptly.
“Yes. Yes, I have.”
“I haven’t,” she said.
“So that I go about,” she added, “like
someone who is looking for something. I’d
like to know if it’s not jabbing too searching
a question at you—what you have found.”
Sir Richmond considered. “Incidentally,”
he smiled, “I want to get a lasso over the neck
of that very forcible and barbaric person, your father.
I am doing my best to help lay the foundation of a
scientific world control of fuel production and distribution.
We have a Fuel Commission in London with rather wide
powers of enquiry into the whole world problem of
fuel. We shall come out to Washington presently
with proposals.”
Miss Grammont surveyed the landscape. “I
suppose,” she said, “poor father is
rather like an unbroken mule in business affairs.
So many of our big business men in America are.
He’ll lash out at you.”
“I don’t mind if only he lashes out openly
in the sight of all men.”
She considered and turned on Sir Richmond gravely.
“Tell me what you want to do to him. You
find out so many things for me that I seem to have
been thinking about in a sort of almost invisible
half-conscious way. I’ve been suspecting
for a long time that Civilization wasn’t much
good unless it got people like my father under some
sort of control. But controlling father—as
distinguished from managing him!” She reviewed
some private and amusing memories. “He is
a most intractable man.”
