I traveled. I tore myself away from
everything scientific and plunged into the business of living. Almost
overnight I became an adventurer, tasting sensations with the same
ardor I had once given to my work. I went back to art, to painting and
literature and music. I was a connoisseur of wines and of foods and of
women. I was an experimenter with life.

"Little by little, though, the zest of that passed away. I grew tired of
my dilettantism. And eventually I found that, even while I had been
moving about the world and experiencing its curious values, my mind had
been grappling quietly, subconsciously, with my old problem. The change
in my life had given me the wider outlook, the keener understanding
necessary to the accomplishment of my task. In the end, I went back to
it again with renewed vigor. With greater power, too, and greater
sanity."

* * * * *

Melbourne paused here. Sensing his need, I brought him a highball, and
one for myself. He tasted it with a quizzical expression.

"They call this whisky nowadays!" he observed absently, with quiet
irony. I wanted to hear the rest of his account.

"Go on with your story, sir," I begged him.

"The rest is simple enough--but it's the meat of the narrative. You see,
I had to revise the way I was going about my work, and I went at it at a
new angle. By this time wireless telegraphy was being widely developed,
and there were many features of it that appealed to me. With the
knowledge I had gained during my first feverish years of experiment,
however, I was able to go far beyond what has been done in recent times
with radio.

"I used a system differing in many respects from that of the commercial
radio. We haven't time now to go into all that--I can tell you later,
and it involves much that is highly technical and still secret. It is
sufficient if I explain that my object was to evolve and fuse methods
for doing with each of the senses what radio does with sound.
Telephotography was the simplest problem--the others required an almost
superhuman amount of labor.

"But my biggest job was to combine them. And, to do that, I had to use
knowledge I had gained not only in the laboratory but in my wanderings
about the earth--not only in the colleges and salons of Europe and
America, but in the bazaars and temples of India, Egypt, China. I had to
unite the lore of ancient and modern civilizations, and I created a new
factor in electrical scienc