“Single?”—Yes.
“Children?”—None.
“Age?”—Nearly twenty.
The questions followed each other with the rapidity of machine-gun bullets. These preliminaries over, he looked up at me with the benevolent Fairy Godfather expression of, “Now, young fellow, I’m doing my best, I want to help you, but you must meet me half-way.”
“Now,” he said kindly, “what work did you do before the war?”
“None at all,” I answered truthfully; “I was at school.”
“Then you don’t know what you are going to do when you get back?”
“Oh, something to do with books,” I hazarded.
“Ah, yes, Book-keeping. Then I suppose that what you want is a really sound commercial education?”
And he was about to jot down “Commerce” when I pointed out that what I really wanted to do was not to keep books, but to write them.