turned to me again.
"Well, suppose it was an accident. Here you are! Now you're here, what
are you going to do? You're young. Is it to be Parliament? heard some
men the other day talking about you. Before I knew you were you. They
said that was what you ought to do."...

She put me through my intentions with a close and vital curiosity. It
was just as she had tried to imagine me a soldier and place me years
ago. She made me feel more planless and incidental than ever. "You want
to make a flying-machine," she pursued, "and when you fly? What then?
Would it be for fighting?"

I told her something of my experimental work. She had never heard of
the soaring aeroplane, and was excited by the thought, and keen to hear
about it. She had thought all the work so far had been a mere projecting
of impossible machines. For her Pilcher and Lilienthal had died in vain.
She did not know such men had lived in the world.

"But that's dangerous!" she said, with a note of discovery.

"Oh!--it's dangerous."

"Bee-atrice!" Lady Osprey called.

Beatrice dropped from the wall to her feet.

"Where do you do this soaring?"

"Beyond the high Barrows. East of Crest Hill and the wood."

"Do you mind people coming to see?"

"Whenever you please. Only let me know"

"I'll take my chance some day. Some day soon." She looked at me
thoughtfully, smiled, and our talk was at an end.

IV

All my later work in aeronautics is associated in my memory with the
quality of Beatrice, with her incidental presence, with things she said
and did and things I thought of that had reference to her.

In the spring of that year I had got to a flying machine that lacked
nothing but longitudinal stability. My model flew like a bird for fifty
or a hundred yards or so, and then either dived and broke its nose or,
what was commoner, reared up, slid back and smashed its propeller. The
rhythm of the pitching puzzled me. I felt it must obey some laws not
yet quite clearly stated. I became therefore a student of theory and
literature for a time; I hit upon the string of considerations that led
me to what is called Ponderevo's Principle and my F.R.S., and I worked
this out in three long papers. Meanwhile I made a lot of turn-table
and glider models and started in upon an idea of combining gas-bags and
gliders. Balloon work was new to me. I had made one or two ascents in
the balloons of the Aero Club before I started my gasometer and
the balloon shed and gave Cotho