“How are you getting on with your flying-machine?” she asked. (“I wonder if I shall ever meet any one with the sense not to ask that,” thought Monson.) “It will be very dangerous at first, will it not?” (“Thinks I’m afraid.”) “Jorgon is going to play presently; have you heard him before?” (“My mania being attended to, we turn to rational conversation.”) Gush about Jorgon; gradual decline of conversation, ending with—“You must let me know when your flying-machine is finished, Mr. Monson, and then I will consider the advisability of taking a ticket.” (“One would think I was still playing inventions in the nursery.”) But the bitterest thing she said was not meant for Monson’s ears. To Phlox, the novelist, she was always conscientiously brilliant. “I have been talking to Mr. Monson, and he can think of nothing, positively nothing, but that flying-machine of his. Do you know, all his workmen call that place of his ‘Monson’s Folly’? He is quite impossible. It is really very, very sad. I always regard him myself in the light of sunken treasure—the Lost Millionaire, you know.” She was pretty and well educated,—indeed, she had written an epigrammatic novelette; but the bitterness was that she was typical. She summarised what the world thought of the man who was working sanely, steadily, and surely towards a more tremendous revolution in the appliances of civilisation, a more far-reaching alteration in the ways of humanity than has ever been effected since history began. They did not even take him seriously. In a little while he would be proverbial. “I must fly now,” he said on his way home, smarting with a sense of absolute social failure. “I _must_ fly soon. If it doesn’t come off soon, by God! I shall run amuck.” He said that before he had gone through his pass-book and his litter of papers. Inadequate as the cause seems, it was that girl’s voice and the expression of her eyes that precipitated his discontent. But certainly the discovery that he had no longer even one hundred thousand pounds’ worth of realisable property behind him was the poison that made the wound deadly. It was the next day after this that he exploded upon Woodhouse and his workmen, and thereafter his bearing was consistently grim for three weeks, and anxiety dwelt in Cheam and Ewell, Malden, Morden, and Worcester Park, places that had thriven mightily on his experiments. Four weeks after that first swearing of his, he stood with Woodhouse by the reconstructed machine as it lay across the elevated railway, by means of which it gained its initial impetus. The new propeller glittered a brighter white than the rest of the machine, and a gilder, obedient to a whim of Monson’s, was picking out the aluminium bars with gold. And looking down the long avenue between the ropes (gilded now with the sunset), one saw red signals, and two miles away an anthill of workmen busy altering the last falls of the run into a rising slope.