Let me
make it clearer. Do you know anything about steam?"
"Very little. But go on."
"Well, the coherer is like a steam-valve. Any child can open a valve and
start a steamer's engines, because a turn of the hand lets in the main
steam, doesn't it? Now, this home battery here ready to print is the main
steam. The coherer is the valve, always ready to be turned on. The
Hertzian wave is the child's hand that turns it."
"I see. That's marvellous."
"Marvellous, isn't it? And, remember, we're only at the beginning. There's
nothing we sha'n't be able to do in ten years. I want to live--my God, how
I want to live, and see it develop!" He looked through the door at Shaynor
breathing lightly in his chair. "Poor beast! And he wants to keep company
with Fanny Brand."
"Fanny _who_?" I said, for the name struck an obscurely familiar chord in
my brain--something connected with a stained handkerchief, and the word
"arterial."
"Fanny Brand--the girl you kept shop for." He laughed, "That's all I know
about her, and for the life of me I can't see what Shaynor sees in her, or
she in him."
"_Can't_ you see what he sees in her?" I insisted.
"Oh, yes, if _that's_ what you mean. She's a great, big, fat lump of a
girl, and so on. I suppose that's why he's so crazy after her. She isn't
his sort. Well, it doesn't matter. My uncle says he's bound to die before
the year's out. Your drink's given him a good sleep, at any rate.
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