there was in Marion's form and colour, something I find and lose in
Mantegna's pictures, something in the lines of these boats I make. (You
should see X2, my last and best!)

I can't explain myself, I perceive. Perhaps it all comes to this, that
I am a hard and morally limited cad with a mind beyond my merits.
Naturally I resist that as a complete solution. Anyhow, I had a sense of
inexorable need, of distress and insufficiency that was unendurable, and
for a time this aeronautical engineering allayed it....

In the end of this particular crisis of which I tell so badly, I
idealised Science. I decided that in power and knowledge lay the
salvation of my life, the secret that would fill my need; that to these
things I would give myself.

I emerged at last like a man who has been diving in darkness, clutching
at a new resolve for which he had groped desperately and long.

I came into the inner office suddenly one day--it must have been just
before the time of Marion's suit for restitution--and sat down before my
uncle.

"Look here," I said, "I'm sick of this."

"HulLO!" he answered, and put some papers aside.

"What's up, George?"

"Things are wrong."