in to you off-hand," he said. "It's
strange and it's new. It needs preparation."

"I'm ready to listen," I said with eager interest. He smiled.

"Perhaps I had better tell you a little of my life."

"Go on," I answered briefly.

"I had ideas much like yours when I was a boy," he began his story. "In
high school and college I had believed myself an artist. I was a good
musician, and I dabbled with painting and literature. I wanted to come
back for post-graduate work, though, and something attracted me to
science. I had put off studying mathematics until my graduating year,
only to find that it fascinated me. And I was curious about physics.

* * * * *

"While I was studying for my Master's degree and my Doctorate, I felt
the need of some interest to merge all the divergent sides of my nature.
Something that would give me a chance to be both the artist and the man
of science. That was a quarter of a century ago. The motion picture and
the phonograph were just coming into the public eye. They seemed to
supply just the field for which I felt a need.

"I had much the same idea as yourself, except that there were no
discoveries to back it--no color photography, no method for harmonizing
sound and sight. Indeed, neither the screen nor the phonograph had come
to be regarded yet as essentially more than a toy. But, like yourself,
I had vision. And enthusiasm. And an intense desire to create.

"After I had taken my degrees, I went to work with almost abnormal
intensity. With sufficient income to live as I desired, I fitted up my
laboratory and concentrated on the thing I wanted to do. I spent years
at it. I gave my youth--or, at least, the best of my youth--to that
labor. Long before sound and color pictures were perfected commercially,
I had developed similar processes for myself. But they were not what I
wanted. The real thing was beyond my grasp, and I couldn't see how to
attain it.

"I worked feverishly. I think I must have worked myself into a sort of
frenzy, a sort of madness. I never mingled with people, and I became
bitter and despondent. One day my nerves broke down. I smashed
everything in my laboratory, all my models, all my apparatus, and I
burned the plans and papers I had labored over for years.

"My physician told me that I must rest and recuperate. He told me I must
interest myself again in daily life, in people and inanimate things. So
I went away. For the next few years