I  
The one astonishing thing about life, as we have but now mentioned, is its utter commonplaceness. It is a terrible thing to die, to end our connection with life as we know it; yet folk die, and the world accepts the fact with not more than a few hours' concern. Folk are born, a very wonderful thing, yet a common. We flash messages across the sea—as soon we shall across the ether, to other planets. The latter event will be but of brief interest. We travel by impounded steam, and have long ago ceased to marvel at that miracle. Soon we will travel by means of other power, at speeds inconceivable to-day. Were that time here we would not wonder. It is all, all commonplace. And none of us does much thinking. It is only over the unimportant things that we ponder. Thus, over a revolution in politics we chatter excitedly; but the revolution in principles excites us not at all. The revolution in science, in thought, in life, is accepted, when it comes, with no concern, as though belonging to us from time immemorial; as indeed it did.
 
It was wholly within human practice that affairs should now go on at Kelly Row much as they had always gone, in spite of the fact that Kelly Row now harbored, in a certain woodshed back of the dingy Rawn abode, ideas and deeds that had not earlier been known in Kelly Row routine. Here Mr. Rawn and his intending son-in-law were carrying on experiments whose most immediate result, in case of success, would be the extrication of Mr. Rawn from rather an awkward situation; because, although Mr. Rawn, in the usual and commonplace human fashion, had taken as his own an idea when he saw it, he negligently had done so forgetful of the fact that it still lacked many features as a definite commercial proposition.
 
 
 
 
II
 
Rawn had told the truth regarding his resources. He had but one month's salary in his pocket when these final experiments began, and for this money there was just as much need as there ever had been in any other month; for Laura Rawn had quite as much use, at the going scale of living, for one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month now, as she had had for seventy-five dollars a month five years earlier. Yet when Laura Rawn suggested a deferred payment on certain weekly bills, the shopkeepers to whom she had been paying her stipend daily for years demurred sorely. The truth is that the poorest way in the world to establish a credit is to pay bills in cash. Foolishly allow a man to see your cash, and he can see nothing else. Pay him partly in cash, partly in good checks, partly in bad ones, and partly not at all, and he will trust you largely; this being a commercial truth not known of all men, although worth knowing. It may be seen, therefore, that young Halsey's little capital of five hundred dollars was as important as young Halsey's original idea; which latter Mr. Rawn had also appropriated.
 
So now these tw............