nor the smiles that are situate between a gay corsage and a picture hat.
They never wonder, at a loss, what they will do next. Their evenings
never drag--are always too short. You may, indeed, catch them at twelve
o'clock at night on the flat of their backs; but not in bed! No, in a
shed, under a machine, holding a candle (whose paths drop fatness) up to
the connecting-rod that is strained, or the wheel that is out of centre.
They are continually interested, nay, enthralled. They have a machine,
and they are perfecting it. They get one part right, and then another
goes wrong; and they get that right, and then another goes wrong, and so
on. When they are quite sure they have reached perfection, forth issues
the machine out of the shed--and in five minutes is smashed up, together
with a limb or so of the inventors, just because they had been quite
sure too soon. Then the whole business starts again. They do not give
up--that particular wreck was, of course, due to a mere oversight; the
whole business starts again. For they have glimpsed perfection; they
have the gleam of perfection in their souls. Thus their lives run away.
'They will never fly!' you remark, cynically. Well, if they don't?
Besides, what about Wright? With all your cynicism, have you never
envied them their machine and their passionate interest in it?

You know, perhaps, the moment when, brushing in front of the glass, you
detected your first grey hair. You stopped brushing; then you resumed
brushing, hastily; you pretended not to be shocked, but you were.
Perhaps you know a more disturbing moment than that, the moment when it
suddenly occurred to you that you had 'arrived' as far as you ever will
arrive; and you had realised as much of your early dream as you ever
will realise, and the realisation was utterly unlike the dream; the
marriage was excessively prosaic and eternal, not at all what you
expected it to be; and your illusions were dissipated; and games and
hobbies had an unpleasant core of tedium and futility; and the ideal
tobacco-mixture did not exist; and one literary masterpiece resembled
another; and all the days that are to come will more or less resemble
the present day, until you die; and in an illuminating flash you
understood what all those people were driving at when they wrote such
unconscionably long letters to the _Telegraph_ as to life being worth
living or not worth living; and there was naught to be done but face the
grey, monoton