Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/190

178 more intimate meaning for us. It is bringing us into directer relation with public affairs,—making them matter as formerly they didn’t seem to matter. That idea of the bright little private life has to go by the board.”

“I suppose it has,” she said, meditatively, as though she had been thinking over some such question before.

“The private life,” she said, “has a way of coming aboard again.”

Her reflections travelled fast and broke out now far ahead of him.

“You have some sort of work cut out for you,” she said abruptly.

“Yes. Yes, I have.”

“I haven’t,” she said.

“So that I go about,” she added, “like someone who is looking for something. I’d like to know—if it’s not jabbing too searching a question at you—what you have found.”

Sir Richmond considered. “Incidentally,” he smiled, “I want to get a lasso over the neck of that very forcible and barbaric person, your father. I am doing my best to help lay the foundation of a scientific world control of fuel production and distribution. We have a Fuel Commission in London with rather wide powers of enquiry into the whole world problem of fuel. We shall come out to Washington presently with proposals.”