"Good?" echoed the other, with hollow incredulity. "It's the biggest damn honor you can get, I'd have you know! I go there next year. Six months, and then anything can happen. I'll probably wind up as a colonel, one day. Can you imagine me as a colonel?" He peered round to look at the three pips on his shoulder-strap, as though trying to envisage what it would look like.
In person Frank Sharpless was a rangy, dark-haired, good-looking fellow, with a real good humor which made him liked everywhere. Also, he had a first-rate mathematical brain. But he did not seem very adept at concealing his feelings. Though he was full of beans this morning, yet he clearly had something on his mind, worrying him.
"Many congratulations," said Courtney, "and all the luck in the world. Cheer-ho."
"Cheer-ho.".
"Your father's pleased, I imagine?"
"Oh, pleased as Punch! — Look here, Phil." After taking a deep pull at the tankard, Sharpless set it down abruptly. But he appeared to change his mind again, and edged away from what he had been thinking about. "Still ghosting, are you?"
When it is stated that Philip Courtney was a ghost, and a real king-specter among ghosts, this means merely that he was a ghost-writer.
He wrote, in short, those autobiographies and reminiscences of well-known persons, eminent, famous, or merely notorious, which the well-known people signed. Phil Courtney was also a conscientious craftsman who really enjoyed his work.
He was a stickler for realism. He tried to make the autobiography of a celebrated harlot sound as though it had actually been written by the celebrated harlot, if she had. been endowed with a little — just a very little — more culture and imagination. He tried to make the reminiscences of a sporting peer sound as though they had actually been written by the sporting peer, if he had been endowed with a little — just a very little-more brains. And this pleased everybody.
To him these books were completely satisfying. They represented so many characters he had created, so many personalities of which he was a part, with the advantage over fiction that these characters were real. You could find them in the telephone book or, if sufficiently exasperated by their temperament, kick them in the pants.