At the time when he asked Julie to be his wife, he believed that he was at last making the proper step towards a new kind of life. After all, in spite of all the tons of fiction to the contrary, it is still not considered entirely orthodox for a business executive to marry his secretary. Marriage with Julie had seemed, to Marc, to offer the sort of life he coveted. Then, she had been as casual and convention-free a girl as any man would care to split a pint of gin with in a butler's pantry. Not that Marc ever had, however. Even then, though, had Marc been better schooled in matters of maids, mates and matrimony, he might have recognized in the cool blue of Julie's eyes, in the precise way she carried her statuesque body, the seeds of wedded woodenness. As it was, the revelation did not occur until after that fatal moment at the altar. The wedding ceremony had worked a magic in Julie that, to Marc's mind, was as black as pure onyx. Instantly, she had become a rigid suburban matron, corseted tightly in all the whale-boned dictates of suburban respectability. Under Julie's efficient supervision Marc had found himself settled down with a thud that was almost audible. Julie took up club work with a fire and fervor that was truly frightening. She ran for election to committees and officerships with a wind and stamina that would have been admirable in an Olympic torchbearer. She sat on more boards than a lumber mill laborer at lunch time. Every book of etiquette written by man, woman or child found its way into her library, and she stuck to the rules with all the tenacity of an umpire on a World Series game. Worst of all, though, she took to brewing weak tea and making watercress sandwiches. Briefly, Julie had become that odious thing: the perfectly terrible perfect wife. If Marc grew sallow and sullen under this regime, Julie's smiling and well-modulated suggestion was that he take up a hobby and turn his mind to something constructive. To her own purposes, as well as everyone else's, she might have done better to keep her pretty mouth shut. It was this suggestion that gave birth to the basement laboratory and the madness that followed.... It is difficult to believe that any man of so steady a nature as Marc Pillsworth would seriously conceive the idea of chemically treating metals and other weighted materials in such a way as to make them lighter than air. Yet, that precisely is the madness that wormed its way into Marc's mind. The idea had developed slowly. For almost a month, from his office window, Marc had watched the construction of the building across the street. The main difficulty, as the building stretched lazily upward, obviously was the transportation of the heavier materials. That was the thing that made the work so slow. * * * * *