Miss Prosser took the pen and tried to dip into the pot. The nib's point struck like a beak on a stone. She prodded again; once more it struck the edge of the pot.
"It's a fountain pen, Miss Prosser," the Chief Assistant stammered, pushing the book towards her. "The ink's in it already. You don't have to dip."
Her hand was trembling even more violently now and her "E" was a cryptic wavering line. At "P" the nib stuck like a dart in the paper and a blot gathered around it. She could not make an "r".

He remembered the dive at an unsuspected spherr-brekker and suddenly cannon fire everywhere, tearing through wires and wings! He remembered the explosion, the flames, the terrifying fall.

The track to the mill was rutted and overgrown and the car bumped and slid along between trees and brambles. Getting out, they mounted past three rickety landings to the topmost floor, bending low to pass beneath the rusting machinery. For a moment Croser paused, looking down to the reed-choked pool....
“It’s nice here,” he thought: “it’s like that picture I was looking at, those flowers in the water, the white ones with the yellow middles, that shadow, the heat.... We could live in a converted mill with a thatch.”
She had spread out her silk dust coat on a bed of sacks and was lying with one hand behind her head, relaxed and expectant.

[Croser thought]"It's nice here: it's like that picture I was looking at, those flowers in the water, the white ones with the yellow middles, the shadow, the heat".

Mr Croser ... called out ... "Take up your pens. Make a deep dip, raise your faces twelve inches from the point of the nib, and begin."