, was
the stuff of one brutal Prussian. What quarrel had we with him?...

Other memories of Heinrich flitted across Mr. Britling's reverie.
Heinrich at hockey, running with extreme swiftness and little skill,
tricked and baffled by Letty, dodged by Hugh, going headlong forward and
headlong back, and then with a cry flinging himself flat on the ground
exhausted.... Or again Heinrich very grave and very pink, peering
through his glasses at his cards at Skat.... Or Heinrich in the boats
upon the great pond, or Heinrich swimming, or Heinrich hiding very, very
artfully from the boys about the garden on a theory of his own, or
Heinrich in strange postures, stalking the deer in Claverings Park. For
a time he had had a great ambition to creep quite close to a deer and
_touch_ it.... Or Heinrich indexing. He had a passion for listing and
indexing books, music, any loose classifiable thing. His favourite
amusement was devising schemes for the indentation of dictionary leaves,
so that one could turn instantly to the needed word. He had bought and
cut the edges of three dictionaries; each in succession improved upon
the other; he had had great hopes of patents and wealth arising
therefrom.... And his room had been a source of strange sounds; his
search for music upon the violin. He had hoped when he came to
Matching's Easy to join "some string quartette." But Matching's Easy
produced no string quartette. He had to fall back upon the pianola, and
try to play duets with that. Only the pianola did all the duet itself,
and in the hands of a small Britling was apt to betray a facetious
moodiness; sudden alternations between extreme haste and extreme
lassitude....

Then there came a memory of Heinrich talking very seriously; his glasses
magnifying his round blue eyes, talking of his ideas about life, of his
beliefs and disbeliefs, of his ambitions and prospects in life.

He confessed two principal ambitions. They varied perhaps in their
absolute dimensions, but they were of equal importance in his mind. The
first of these was, so soon as he had taken his doctorate in philology,
to give himself to the perfecting of an International Language; it was
to combine all the virtues of Esperanto and Ido. "And then," said Herr
Heinrich, "I do not think there will be any more wars--ever." The second
ambition, which was important first because Herr Heinrich found much
delight in working at it, and secondly because he thought it would give
him gre