a clear inevitable consequence of his having
invented and made it--everybody in the world, indeed, seemed to take
it for granted; there wasn't a gap anywhere in that serried front of
anticipation--that he would proudly and cheerfully get aboard it, ascend
with it, and fly.

But we know now pretty clearly that simple pride and cheerfulness
in such an act were singularly out of harmony with Filmer's private
constitution. It occurred to no one at the time, but there the fact is.
We can guess with some confidence now that it must have been drifting
about in his mind a great deal during the day, and, from a little
note to his physician complaining of persistent insomnia, we have the
soundest reason for supposing it dominated his nights,--the idea that it
would be after all, in spite of his theoretical security, an abominably
sickening, uncomfortable, and dangerous thing for him to flap about in
nothingness a thousand feet or so in the air. It must have dawned upon
him quite early in the period of being the Greatest Discoverer of This
or Any Age, the vision of doing this and that with an extensive void
below. Perhaps somewhen in his youth he had looked down a great height
or fallen down in some excessively uncomfortable way; perhaps some habit
of sleeping on the wrong side had resulted in that disagreeable falling
nightmare one knows, and given him his horror; of the strength of that
horror there remains now not a particle of doubt.

Apparently he had never weighed this duty of flying in his earlier days
of research; the machine had been his end, but now things were opening
out beyond his end, and particularly this giddy whirl up above there. He
was a Discoverer and he had Discovered. But he was not a Flying Man, and
it was only now that he was beginning to perceive clearly that he was
expected to fly. Yet, however much the thing was present in his mind he
gave no expression to it until the very end, and meanwhile he went to
and fro from Banghurst's magnificent laboratories, and was interviewed
and lionised, and wore good clothes, and ate good food, and lived in
an elegant flat, enjoying a very abundant feast of such good, coarse,
wholesome Fame and Success as a man, starved for all his years as he had
been starved, might be reasonably expected to enjoy.

After a time, the weekly gatherings in Fulham ceased. The model had
failed one day just for a moment to respond to Filmer's guidance, or he
had been distracted by the comp