security, an abominably sickening, uncomfortable, and dangerous
thing for him to flap about in nothingness a thousand feet or so
in the air. It must have dawned upon him quite early in the period
of being the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age, the vision
of doing this and that with an extensive void below. Perhaps
somewhen in his youth he had looked down a great height or fallen
down in some excessively uncomfortable way; perhaps some habit of
sleeping on the wrong side had resulted in that disagreeable falling
nightmare one knows, and given him his horror; of the strength
of that horror there remains now not a particle of doubt.

Apparently he had never weighed this duty of flying in his earlier
days of research; the machine had been his end, but now things
were opening out beyond his end, and particularly this giddy whirl
up above there. He was a Discoverer and he had Discovered.
But he was not a Flying Man, and it was only now that he was beginning
to perceive clearly that he was expected to fly. Yet, however much
the thing was present in his mind he gave no expression to it until
the very end, and meanwhile he went to and fro from Banghurst's
magnificent laboratories, and was interviewed and lionised, and
wore good clothes, and ate good food, and lived in an elegant flat,
enjoying a very abundant feast of such good, coarse, wholesome
Fame and Success as a man, starved for all his years as he had been
starved, might be reasonably expected to enjoy.

After a time, the weekly gatherings in Fulham ceased. The model
had failed one day just for a moment to respond to Filmer's guidance,
or he had been distracted by the compliments of an archbishop.
At any rate, it suddenly dug its nose into the air just a little
too steeply as the archbishop was sailing through a Latin quotation