“Very good. Marvin, if I get that explosive you may draw on me for five hundred and waste it on your alma mater.”
“How much am I to pay for the silica?”
“Whatever you think it’s worth. Pay somewhere between ten dollars an acre and a thousand. Ten thousand for either island is the upward limit.”
Chapter 23. Vanadium
Having accepted this commission from a sense of his general uselessness, the mutilated man said good-night and went to his room. How carefully comfortable it had been made by loving bands! Even the telephone was there to console him.
So he telephoned a telegram:
Miss Coggeshall, Eglantine, Wickford, Conn.
Home and hungry. Do you know anybody who would invite Gratia and me to dinner?
Marvin.
No sooner had he sent it than he realized its misleading quality. He was hungry in the literal sense, not hungry for Gratia. Language was always spilling over like that. Take the idiotic names of the elements—names of towns, islands, countries, men, colors, goddesses, anything to conceal the one important thing, the number. Nitrogen did not give birth, phosphorus did not carry more light than vanadium, and vanadium was not the goddess of love.