that's no good. If you tell him he won't believe it.
You'll have all his chivalry up in arms. And you'll be putting into his
head what may never come into it if he's left alone. And you'll be
putting it into Desmond's head."

* * * * *

Captain Drayton, whom Anthony consulted, said, "Leave him alone." Those
painting and writing johnnies were a rum lot. You couldn't take them
seriously. The Desmond girl might be everything that Vera Harrison said
she was. He didn't think, though, that the idea of making love to her
would enter Nicky's head if they left him alone. Nicky's head had more
important ideas in it.

So they left him alone.

* * * * *

And at first Nicholas really was too busy to think much of Desmond. Too
busy with his assistant manager's job at the Morss Motor Works; too busy
with one of the little ideas to which he owed the sudden rise in his
position: the little idea of making the Morss cars go faster; too busy
with his big Idea which had nothing whatever to do with the Morss
Company and their cars.

His big Idea was the idea of the Moving Fortress. The dream of a French
engineer, the old, abandoned dream of the _forteresse mobile_, had
become Nicky's passion. He claimed no originality for his idea. It was a
composite of the amoured train, the revolving turret, the tractor with
caterpillar wheels and the motor-car. These things had welded themselves
together gradually in Nicky's mind during his last year at Cambridge.
The table in Nicky's sitting-room at the top of the house in Chelsea was
now covered with the parts of his model of the Moving Fortress. He made
them at the Works, one by one; for the Morss Company were proud of him,
and he had leave to use their material and plant now and then for little
ideas of his own. The idea of the Moving Fortress was with him all day
in the workshops and offices and showrooms, hovering like a formless
spiritual presence among the wheeled forms. But in the evening it took
shape and sound. It arose and moved, after its fashion, as he had
conceived it, beautiful, monstrous, terrible. At night, beside the image
of the _forteresse mobile_, the image of Desmond was a thin ghost that
stood back, mournful and dumb, in the right-hand corner of the vision.

But the image of Desmond was there.

At first it stood for Nicky's predominant anxiety: "I wonder when
Desmond will have finished the drawings."

The mode