“That will be fine. If I didn’t have to watch Lushing’s outfit so closely, I’d like to go with him.”
She looked up quickly. “Have you ever had a real vacation, David?”
“I suppose not; not in your sense of the word. I was out on field work during the four college summers. I’m saving up for my honeymoon.”
“I thought you said that was only a dream; a ‘pipe-dream,’ you called it, didn’t you?”
“I did; and it is. I was only joking. The only thing I can talk seriously about is the big job. And you are not interested especially in that—or are you? Plegg said one day when we were speaking of you that you were a pretty good little engineer. I’m quoting him literally. He meant it as a compliment.”
“Mr. Plegg,” she said, with a touch of abstraction which the mention of the first assistant’s name seemed to evoke. “Do you like him?”
“Immensely; though he always gives me the feeling that there are nooks and corners in him that he never allows anybody to explore. I met him first a year ago. It was in the Pullman, when I was going home from Florida. He had the upper berth in my section, and we scraped an acquaintance of a sort just as the train was pulling into Middleboro, though neither of us learned the other’s name. I remembered him chiefly on account of his sardonic smile, and a queer thing he said to me.”
“Will the queer thing bear repeating?”
“To you, yes. He made a running commentary on my face—like one of those street-corner physiognomists, you know; eyes, nose, jaw, and so on, and said I’d probably go far in my profession if I wasn’t too good.”
“What an exceedingly odd thing for a stranger to say to you!”