As she came forward to meet me, her smile effaced the strained expression which I had noticed in the morning. In these surroundings she seemed different, somehow. The artistry of the room fitted her own beauty so that each appeared to find its complement in the other. It seemed to me that she was designed by destiny for this environment, and not for the harder work of the world. And yet, she gave no suggestion of triviality; there was no hint of a feminine desire to attract. It must have been that she harmonised so well with the frame in which I saw her. And the personality which gazed from her eyes seemed in some way to blend with this world of shaded lights, graceful outlines and innate simplicity.
Nordenholt came into the room almost at once with a grave apology to Miss Huntingtower for being late.
“Convenient having a house in the University Square,” he said to me. “If we hadn’t taken over some of these professors’ residences, it would have meant such a waste of time getting to and fro between one’s home and the office. That was one reason why I selected the University as a centre. We had the whole thing ready-made for us.”
Henley-Davenport arrived almost at once; and we went down to dinner. I had begun to re-acclimatise myself in these surroundings; but I still recall that evening in every detail. The shaded candles on the table, which soothed my straining eyes, the glitter of silver and crystal on the snowy cloth, Nordenholt’s lean visage half in shadow except when he leaned forward into the soft illumination, Henley-Davenport’s sharp voice driving home a point, and Miss Huntingtower’s eager face as she glanced from speaker to speaker or put a question to one of us: with it all, I seemed back again in my lost world and the Nitrogen Area appeared to belong to another region of my life.
But even here it penetrated, though faintly. The usual topics of conversation were gone: theatres, books, all our old interests had been uprooted and cast aside, so that we could only take them up in the form of reminiscence. And, as a matter of fact, we talked very little about them. I tried one or two tentative efforts; but Henley-Davenport, who had known Nordenholt and his ward longer than I, made very little attempt to follow me: and I soon gathered that Miss Huntingtower was better pleased with other subjects.
What appeared to interest her most was the general situation; and I was rather flattered to find that she seemed anxious to hear my own views.
She seemed to be one of those people who are gifted with the faculty of drawing one out. I don’t mean that she sat silent and merely listened; but she had the knack of stimulating one to talk and of keeping one to the main line by occasional questions, which showed that she had not only followed what had been said but had silently commented upon it as one went along. Yet she never appeared to lose her charm by aping masculinity. Her outlook was a feminine one in its essentials, even if her mind was acute. And she had the gift of naturalness. There was no artificiality either in look or speech. She made me feel almost at once as though I had known her for years.
One thing I did notice about her. Whenever Nordenholt spoke she seemed to hang on his words and to weigh them mentally. The two seemed to be joined by some intimate bond of understanding; and I could see that Nordenholt was proud of her in his way.
Dinner drew to an end, and Nordenholt began to question Henley-Davenport about his researches. Miss Huntingtower interrupted at the beginning with a request for simple language.
“If you begin talking about uranium-X1 and meso-thorium-2, then I won’t understand you, and I want to know what it is all about.”
“Well, Miss Huntingtower, I think I can make it plain without using uranium-X1 or even eka-tantalum; but it’s hard that I should be forbidden to use all these fine-sounding words, eh? Isn’t it? I submit under protest. It takes away half the pleasure of telling things when one has to put them in mere vulgar English.
“Well”—he had an extraordinary habit of interjecting “well” and by inflecting it in various ways, making it serve as a kind of prelude to his sentences, a sort of keynote, as it were—“Well, I take it that you know what radioactivity is. Some of the atoms are spontaneously breaking down into simpler materials, and in that breakdown they liberate an amount of energy which is immeasurably greater than anything we can obtain by the ordinary chemical reactions which occur when coal is burned or when gas is lighted.
“Well, if we could tap that store of energy which evidently lies within the atom we should have Nature at our feet. She would be done for, beaten, out of the struggle: and we should simply have to walk over the remains and take what we wanted. Until the thing is actually done, none of us can grasp what it will mean; for no one has ever seen unlimited energy under control in this world. We have always had to fight hard for every unit of it that we used.
“Well, there is no doubt that atoms can be broken down. All the radioactive elements split up spontaneously without any help from us. But the quantities of them which we can gather together are so extremely minute that as a source of energy they are feebler than an ordinary wax vesta, for all practical purposes.
“So far, so good. We know the thing can be done; but we haven’t hit on the way of doing it. Is that clear?”
“Quite clear, thanks,” said Miss Huntingtower, with a smile. “Radium without tears, Part I. Now the second
