"Imagine that's your machine," he said. "Now you see there are three possible movements. _This_"--he tilted a dessert-knife from side to side--"_and this_"--he dipped it--"_and this_, which is yawing--you understand?"
"No!" she confessed, with the quickest little gesture. "I couldn't understand those sort of things. I shouldn't want to. What I really want to know is--well, about _it_, like!"
He laughed outright again. "But, that _is_ flying!"
She shook her head. "No, not what I mean. That's all--machinery!" She pronounced the word "machinery" with something almost like disdain. He looked at her as if puzzled.
"Sorry you aren't interested in machinery," he said quite reprovingly, "because, you know, that's just what I _am_ interested in. I'm up to my eyes in it just now, pretty well every minute that I can spare. In fact I've got a machine--only the drawings for it, of course, but----"
"Oh, I don't know about 'invent.' Call it an improvement. It should be about as different from the lumbering concern you saw me go up in to-day as that's different from--say from one of those old Cambrian Railway steam engines," he declared exultantly. "It's----"
Here, he plunged into another vortex of mysterious jargon about "automatic stability," about "skin friction," and a hundred other matters that left the listening girl as giddy as a flight itself might have done.
What she did understand from all this was that here, after all, in the Machine, must be the secret of all the magic. This was what interested the Man. An inventor, too, he talked as if he loved to talk of it--even to her; his steel-blue eyes holding her own. Perhaps he didn't even see her, she thought; perhaps he scarcely remembered there was a girl there, leaving strawberries and cream untasted on an apple-green plate, listening with all her ears, with all of _herself_--as he, with all of himself, guided a machine. Ah, he talked of a just-invented machine as in the same tone Gwenna had heard young mothers talk of their new-born babies.
"Yes," concluded the enthusiast with a long sigh, "if I could get that completed, and upon the market----"
"Well?" Gwenna took up softly; ignorant, but following his every change of tone. "Why can't you?"