He helped her down and saw her to the house. Then he retired to his
island and lay awake in the dark.
The silence was profound. He could hear the blood circulating in his
ears. He could almost hear the trees lifting their tons of sap.
Then the silence was broken by the rustling of squirrels. These were
chemical machines that captured energy, stored it, transformed it, and
dissipated it. They had eight or nine automatic functions, including
reproduction. They drew up no contracts to protect their mates from the
blind chemical urge.
From an upbound steamer came an amorous Hawaiian tune. More dissipation.
The sun squanders energy. Earth squanders energy. Men squander energy,
and have been doing nothing else since they lighted the first fire.
Certainly he had squandered energy that evening, and commonsense advised
him not to make love to her again, or to try to buy her island in the
morning. But her refractoriness only increased his own. The Anglo-Saxon
grit that mingled with his Celtic mobility began to assert itself. He
would certainly try to buy that island in the morning.
And now it occurred to him that the universal waste of energy may not
occur within the atom. He sat up and thought about it There in the
darkling tent he tried to frame some equations that would explain the
dispersion of light without upsetting what he believed about the motions
of electrons.