“And what happened?”
“Let me think. Oh, nothing happened because a live man appeared on the scene and quickly dropped all the little toys of the scientific little girl into a bucket of water.”
“And then?”
“Well, then the scientific little girl cried for a while but when she grew up she married the live little man and they lived happily ever after.”
Amber was blushing like a peony before her friend had finished her parable. When Josephine had begun to speak Amber was beginning to fold her serviette, and now she continued folding it as if she were endeavouring to carry out one of the laborious designs of napkin folding given in the Lady’s columns of some weekly paper. Suddenly, while her friend watched her, she pulled the damask square out of its many folds and tossed its crumpled remains on the tablecloth.
“Psha!” she cried, “there’s not a grain of dynamite among all my little boys.”
“Is there not? You just ask your father to give you an analysis of any little boy, and you’ll find that the result will be something like this:”
(She wrote with her chatelaine pencil on the back of the menu card.)
Amber read the card with blushes and laughter.
“It’s very good fun,” she said. “And there is my motor at the door. You will come with me and see how things are managed?”
“Why should I go?”
“Why should not you go?”
“Oh, I’ll go: whatever it may be it is still a topic.”
“It is much more than a topic: it is a revolution.”
“Then I shall go if only to see it revolve.”
CHAPTER II
The two girls left Sir Creighton Severn’s house in Kensington Palace Gardens, and the dainty little motor Victoria made its way eastwards under the skilful guidance of a young coachman engineer trained by Sir Creighton himself.
Every one has heard of Sir Creighton Severn, the great inventor. A large number of people, if asked what Sir Creighton had invented, would reply “Electricity,” so closely has his name become associated with the development of this power and its adaptation to the various necessities of modern life.
Some time ago there was a general feeling throughout the country that he had gone too far in this direction. There should surely be a limit, people said, to the many humiliations to which scientific men were subjecting that power which after all was nothing less than lightning made captive, and under that name, the most imposing attribute of great Jove himself. It was not so bad to ask it to light a well-appointed drawing-room or to annihilate distance when applied to the end of a few thousand miles of telegraph cable—there was a heroic aspect of its employment in such ways: there was something of the dignity of an international treaty in the relationship existing between civilisation and electricity up to a certain point; but it was going quite too far to set it to cook chump chops for the servants’ dinner, or to heat the irons in the laundry.
People began to feel for electricity, just as they did when they heard the story of King Alfred in the swineherd’s cottage. If the nations had ceased to offer oblations to the leven of Jove that was no reason why it should be degraded to the level of a very scullion.
But when Sir Creighton, after inventing the electric kitchener, and the electric ironer, brought out an electric knife cleaner, an electric boot-black, and an electric mouse trap—nay, when he destroyed the very black-beetles in the kitchen by electricity, people ceased to protest. They only shook their heads and said no good could come of such things.
Of course, these adaptations of the power of which Sir Creighton was looked upon as the legitimate owner in succession to Jupiter (deceased), represented only his hours of relaxation. They were the gleanings, so to speak, of his electric harvest—the heel-taps of his electric banquet: they only brought him in about five thousand a year in royalties. The really great adaptations for which he was responsible filled the world with admiration and his own pockets with money. He had lived so long in close association with electricity that he had come to know every little phase of its nature just as a man—after thirty years or so of married life—comes to have an inkling of his wife’s character. He had invented the electric ship that picked up broken cables at sea by merely passing over where they were laid. He had invented the air purifier which instantly destroyed every injurious element in the atmosphere of large manufacturing towns, making them as pleasant to live in as London itself. He had also produced a fog disperser; but he was not sufficiently satisfied with its operation to give it to the public. It was quite equal to the duty of giving fresh air and sunshine to his own house and gardens, at times when people outside were choking with sulphur and knocking their heads against lamp posts, but this was not enough for Sir Creighton, and he withheld his discovery until he should have so perfected it as to make it applicable to the widest areas.
He had sufficient confidence in his powers and in the ductility of his partner—he had long ago come to allude to electricity as his conjux placens—to feel certain that in the course of a year or two, he would be in a position to clear the Atlantic Ocean of fogs and even to do something with London itself.
But there was another discovery which Sir Creighton hoped he was on the eve of perfecting—the greatest of all the long list already standing to his credit—this was the Electric Digester. He had proved to the satisfaction of every one except himself the possibility of treating not only flesh meat but every form of diet in such a way as practically to obviate the necessity for it to undergo the various tedious processes of digestion before it became assimilated with the system.
He had early in life become impressed with the need of making a departure from the old-fashioned methods of preparing food for human consumption. In the early days of man—he put the date roughly at 150000 b. c., though he admitted that the recent discovery of a fossil scorpion in the Silurian rocks left him about a million years to come and go upon—there was probably no need for an Artificial Digestive. The early man had plenty of exercise. It is quite conceivable that, with such things as the Mammoth, the Mastodon, the Pterodactyl and the Ichtheosaurus roaming about with empty stomachs, the human race should have a good deal of exercise (Scoffers said that the human race was properly so called). But the human race had won the race, and had then settled down for a period of well-earned repose.
This was all very well, but their doing so had changed the most important of the conditions under which they had lived, until, as civilisation strengthened the human digestion had weakened. But instead of openly acknowledging this fact and acting accordingly, physicians had kept trying to tinker up the obsolete machinery with, naturally, the most deplorable results. Instead of frankly acknowledging that man’s digestion had gone the way of the tail, the supplemental stomach, and the muscle that moved the ears, attempts were daily made to stimulate the obsolete processes of digestion, but the result was not stimulating.
Sir Creighton Severn, however, frankly assumed that man had got rid of his digestion to make way for his civilisation, and set about the task of accommodating his diet to his altered conditions of life.
He had not yet succeeded in satisfying himself that his invention of the Electric Digester would do all that he meant it to do; so, in spite of the bitter cry that came from the great pie regions of North America, imploring him to help them, he withheld