When Margot Beste-Chetwynde decides to rebuild King's Thursday - an untouched, timber-framed Tudor house and for three centuries the seat of her late husband's aristocratic forebears, the Earls of Pastmaster - her decision is met mainly with outrage from the inhabitants of the surrounding county. Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde, however, typically unaffected by public opinion, employs Prof. Otto Silenus to level the ancient structure and replace it with a box-like structure of concrete and aluminum.
Prof. Silenus, as he insists on being called, is a peculiar young man, originally from Hamburg, who holds machines and animals in far higher esteem than he does humankind. Unlike nature, which is content simply to be and machines that exist purely to do, man, existing in a constant state of restless flux, repulses Silenus. As he tells a.....
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