women have ever displayed an
unreasonable disposition to imagine that when a man has powers he must
necessarily have Power. Given so much, and what was not good in Filmer's
manner and appearance became an added merit. He was modest, he hated
display, but given an occasion where TRUE qualities are needed,
then--then one would see!

The late Mrs. Bampton thought it wise to convey to Lady Mary her opinion
that Filmer, all things considered, was rather a "grub." "He's certainly
not a sort of man I have ever met before," said the Lady Mary, with a
quite unruffled serenity. And Mrs. Bampton, after a swift, imperceptible
glance at that serenity, decided that so far as saying anything to Lady
Mary went, she had done as much as could be expected of her. But she
said a great deal to other people.

And at last, without any undue haste or unseemliness, the day dawned,
the great day, when Banghurst had promised his public--the world in
fact--that flying should be finally attained and overcome. Filmer saw it
dawn, watched even in the darkness before it dawned, watched its stars
fade and the grey and pearly pinks give place at last to the clear blue
sky of a sunny, cloudless day. He watched it from the window of his
bedroom in the new-built wing of Banghurst's Tudor house. And as the
stars were overwhelmed and the shapes and substances of things grew
into being out of the amorphous dark, he must have seen more and more
distinctly the festive preparations beyond the beech clumps near the
green pavilion in the outer park, the three stands for the privileged
spectators, the raw, new fencing of the enclosure, the sheds and
workshops, the Venetian masts and fluttering flags that Banghurst had
considered essential, black and limp in the breezeless dawn, and amidst
all these things a great shape covered with tarpauling. A strange and
terrible portent for humanity was that shape, a beginning that must
surely spread and widen and change and dominate all the affairs of men,
but to Filmer it is very doubtful whether it appeared in anything but a
narrow and personal light. Several people heard him pacing in the small
hours--for the vast place was packed with guests by a proprietor editor
who, before all understood compression. And about five o'clock, if not
before, Filmer left his room and wandered out of the sleeping house into
the park, alive by that time with sunlight and birds and squirrels and
the fallow deer. MacAndrew, who was also an ear