“You are either mad or are going to get married.”
Micklethwaite cackled louder than ever.
“I am planning a new algebra for school use. If I’m not much mistaken, I can turn out something that will supplant all the present books. Think! If Micklethwaite’s Algebra got accepted in all the schools, what would that mean to Mick? Hundreds a year, my boy—hundreds.”
“I never knew you so indecent.”
“I am renewing my youth. Nay, for the first time I am youthful. I never had time for it before. At the age of sixteen I began to teach in a school, and ever since I have pegged away at it, school and private. Now luck has come to me, and I feel five-and-twenty. When I was really five-and-twenty, I felt forty.”
“Well, what has that to do with money-making?”
“After Mick’s Algebra would follow naturally Mick’s Arithmetic, Mick’s Euclid, Mick’s Trigonometry. Twenty years hence I should have an income of thousands—thousands! I would then cease to teach (resign my professorship—that is to say, for of course I should be professor), and devote myself to a great work on Probability. Many a man has begun the best of his life at sixty—the most enjoyable part of it, I mean.”
Barfoot was perplexed. He knew his friend’s turn for humorous exaggeration, but had never once heard him scheme for material advancement, and evidently this present talk meant something more than a jest.
“Am I right or not? You are going to get married?”
Micklethwaite glanced at the door, then said in a tone of caution,—