"It's not quite so bad as that. You've come on no end though, you know. The last two or three have been astonishingly good. You're not creative. You've got a good sound mind, a good style and a curious intense critical perception. You'll be a critic. But writing, Miriam, should be done with a pen. Can't call yourself a writer till you do it _direct_." "How can I write with a pen, in bed, on my knee, at midnight or dawn?" "A fountain pen?" "No one can write with a fountain pen." "Quite a number of us do. Quite a number of not altogether unsuccessful little writers, Miriam." "Well, it's wrong. How can thought or anything, well thought perhaps can, which doesn't matter and nobody really cares about, wait a minute, nothing _else_ can come through a hand whose fingers are held stiffly apart by a fat slippery barrel. A writing machine. A quill would be the thing, with a fine flourishing tail. But it is too important. It squeaks out an important sense of _writing_, makes people too objective, so that it's as much a man's pen, a mechanical, see life steadily and see it whole (when nobody knows what life _is_) man's view sort of implement as a fountain pen. A pen should be thin, not disturbing the hand, and the nib flexible and silent, with up and down strokes. Fountain pen writing is like ... democracy." "Why not go back to clay tablets?" "Machine-made things are dead things." "You came down here by _train_, Miriam." "I ought to have flown." "You'll fly yet. No. Perhaps you won't. When your dead people have solved the problem, you'll be found weeping over the rusty skeleton of a locomotive." "I don't mean Lilienfeld and Maxim. I can be fearfully interested in all that when I think of it. But to the people who do not see the beginning of flying it won't seem wonderful. It won't change anything." "It'll change, Miriam, pretty well everything. And if you don't mean Lilienfeld and Maxim what _do_ you mean?" "Well, by inventing the telephone we've damaged the chances of telepathy." "Nonsense, Miriam. You're suffering from too much Taylor." "The most striking thing about Taylor is that he does not want to develop his powers." "What powers?" "The things in him that have made him discover things that you admit are true; that make you interested in his little paper." "They're not right you know about their phosphoric bank; energy is not a simple calculable affair." "Now here's a strange thing. That time you met them, the first thing you said when they'd gone, was what's _wrong_ with them? And the next time I met them they said there's something _wrong_ with him. The truth is you are polar opposites and have everything to learn from each other." "Elizabeth Snowden Poole." "Yes. And without him no one would have heard of her. No one understood. And now psychology is going absolutely her way. In fifty years' time her books will be as clear as daylight."