In the end of this particular crisis of which I tell so badly, I idealised Science. I decided that in power and knowledge lay the salvation of my life, the secret that would fill my need; that to these things I would give myself. I emerged at last like a man who has been diving in darkness, clutching at a new resolve for which he had groped desperately and long. I came into the inner office suddenly one day—it must have been just before the time of Marion’s suit for restitution—and sat down before my uncle. “Look here,” I said, “I’m sick of this.” “Hul_lo!_” he answered, and put some papers aside. “What’s up, George?” “Things are wrong.” “As how?” “My life,” I said, “it’s a mess, an infinite mess.” “She’s been a stupid girl, George,” he said; “I partly understand. But you’re quit of her now, practically, and there’s just as good fish in the sea—” “Oh! it’s not that!” I cried. “That’s only the part that shows. I’m sick—I’m sick of all this damned rascality.” “Eh? Eh?” said my uncle. “_What_—rascality?” “Oh, _you_ know. I want some _stuff_, man. I want something to hold on to. I shall go amok if I don’t get it. I’m a different sort of beast from you. You float in all this bunkum. _I_ feel like a man floundering in a universe of soapsuds, up and downs, east and west. I can’t stand it. I must get my foot on something solid or—I don’t know what.” I laughed at the consternation in his face. “I mean it,” I said. “I’ve been thinking it over. I’ve made up my mind. It’s no good arguing. I shall go in for work—real work. No! this isn’t work; it’s only laborious cheating. But I’ve got an idea! It’s an old idea—I thought of years ago, but it came back to me. Look here! Why should I fence about with you? I believe the time has come for flying to be possible. Real flying!” “Flying!” I stuck to that, and it helped me through the worst time in my life. My uncle, after some half-hearted resistance and a talk with my aunt, behaved like the father of a spoilt son. He fixed up an arrangement that gave me capital to play with, released me from too constant a solicitude for the newer business developments—this was in what I may call the later Moggs period of our enterprises—and I went to work at once with grim intensity. But I will tell of my soaring and flying machines in the proper place. I’ve been leaving the story of my uncle altogether too long. I wanted merely to tell how it was I took to this work. I took to these experiments after I had sought something that Marion in some indefinable way had seemed to promise. I toiled and forgot myself for a time, and did many things. Science too has been something of an irresponsive mistress since, though I’ve served her better than I served Marion. But at the time Science, with her order, her inhuman distance, yet steely certainties, saved me from despair. Well, I have still to fly; but incidentally I have invented the lightest engines in the world.