"Hold it!" the Supreme Head snapped. "Don't go into a spring dance. There's a hitch."
"Oh," George said, but his eagerness was not noticeably dampened.
To George, the merest prospect of a visit to Earth was only to be regarded with rapturous anticipation. To him that distant world of mortals was a place of boundless and exquisite attraction. It was made up in equal parts of liquor, women and larceny and anything else that existed there was merely the result of these things brought together in odd combination. For George, Earth was absolutely the last gasp.
Of course George had never achieved the ultimate accomplishment of establishing permanent residence on Earth, for on all of his previous visits he had arrived only to find that Marc was still alive and that he could not legitimately remain. If on these occasions, George had done his level best to rectify this error with whatever murderous means at hand, it did not imply that the ghost held any personal animosity for Marc. It was simply that George's was the sort of temperament which boggled at almost nothing to achieve its end.
"What's the catch?" he asked.
"Don't be flip," the Supreme Head admonished. "And stop syncopating."
"Syncopating?" George asked innocently. "I'm standing perfectly still."
"It's your mind," the Supreme Head said. "It's jogging about like a cat on hot bricks. It shows all over you. This is an occasion of enormous seriousness."
George did his best to assume an expression of profound sobriety. "Yes, sir," he murmured.