THE WORLD SET FREE
chances of participating in any real warfare were very slight, and that, if after all he should participate, it was bound to be so entirely different from these peace manœuvres that his only course as a rational man would be to keep as observantly out of danger as he could until he had learnt the tricks and possibilities of the new conditions. He states this quite frankly. Never was a man more free from sham heroics.
§ 6.
Barnet welcomed the appearance of the atomic engine with the zest of masculine youth in all fresh machinery, and it is evident that for some time he failed to connect the rush of wonderful new possibilities with the financial troubles of his family. "I knew my father was worried," he admits. That cast the smallest of shadows upon his delighted departure for Italy and Greece and Egypt with three congenial companions in one of the new atomic models. They flew over the Channel Isles and Touraine, he mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc—"These new helicopters, we found," he notes, "had abolished all the danger and strain of sudden drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were liable"—and then he went on by way of Pisa, Pæstum, Ghirgenti, and Athens, to visit the pyramids by moonlight,
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