 CHAPTER 1 TAKING ONE SELF FOR GRANTED There are men who are capable of loving a machine more deeply than they can love a woman. They are among the happiest men on earth. This is not a sneer, meanly shot from cover at women. It is simply a statement of notorious fact. Men who worry themselves to distraction over the perfecting of a machine are indubitably blessed beyond their kind. Most of us have known such men. Yesterday they were constructing motor-cars, but today aeroplanes are in the air, or at any rate they ought to be, according to the inventors. Watch the inventors! Invention is not usually their principal business. They must invent in their spare time. They must invent before breakfast. Invent in the strand between lionesses and the office. Invent after dinner. Invent on Sundays. See with what ardour they rush home of a night. See how they seize a half-holiday like hungry dogs a bone. They don't want golf, bridge, limericks, novels, illustrated magazines, clubs, whiskey, betting prices, hints about neckties, political meetings, yarns, comic songs, and turic salts, nor the smiles that situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat. They never wonder at a loss what they will do next. Their evenings never drag are always too short. You may indeed catch them at twelve o'clock at night on the flat of their backs, but not in bed. No, in a shed under a machine, holding a candle whose paths drop fatness up to the connecting rod that is strained or the wheel that is out of centre. They are continually interested, they enthralled, they have a machine, and they are perfecting it. They get one part right, and then another goes wrong, and they get that right, and then another goes wrong, and so on. When they are quite sure they have reached perfection, forth issues the machine out of the shed, and in five minutes is smashed up, together with a limb or so of the inventors, just because they have been quite sure too soon. Then the whole business starts again. They do not give up. That particular wreck was, of course, due to a mere oversight. The whole business starts again, for they have glimpsed perfection. They have the gleam of perfection in their souls, thus they're like... Sample complete. Ready to continue?