Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/91

Rh The darkness concealed a faint smile on the doctor’s face.

“The work is the thing,” said Sir Richmond. “So long as one can keep one’s grip on it.”

“What,” said the doctor after a pause, leaning back and sending wreaths of smoke up towards the star-dusted zenith, “what is your idea of your work? I mean, how do you see it in relation to yourself—and things generally?”

“Put in the most general terms?”

“Put in the most general terms.”

“I wonder if I can put it in general terms for you at all. It is hard to put something one is always thinking about in general terms or to think of it as a whole.... Now.... Fuel?...

“I suppose it was my father’s business interests that pushed me towards specialization in fuel. He wanted me to have a thoroughly scientific training in days when a scientific training was less easy to get for a boy than it is to-day. And much more inspiring when you got it. My mind was framed, so to speak, in geology and astronomical physics. I grew up to think on that scale. Just as a man who has been trained in history and law grows to think on the scale of the Roman empire. I don’t know what your pocket map of the universe is, the map, I mean, by which you judge all sorts of other general ideas. To me this planet is a little ball of oxides and nickel steel; life a sort of tarnish on its surface. And we,—the mi-