“Well, son,” he chirruped in a pleasant crisp voice, “making fair progress, I should say. This your first trip? Great experience; illuminating, developing. Make the most of it—you are young. Perhaps you will like it so well that before we have entirely circumnavigated the globe, you will have sprouted mental wings and will accept the ether for your habitat. I hope so—I hope so! Aerial navigation needs young blood, young enthusiasms.”
“Bosh!” retorted the second sage, Doctor Sims himself. “Bosh! There is no young enthusiasm; it’s grown old, money loving, comfort seeking; its bones creak. Don’t I know? Don’t I teach about a hundred and fifty youngsters every day of the week? Bah!”
“Sims, you are as dry as a dinosaur egg,” Doctor Trigg exploded. “As an instructor in grades equaling yours, I am also in a position to collect data and observe reactions. The world is moved by youthful enthusiasms. It is, thank God, an inexhaustible force, propelling the world; a force, Sims, which our instruments cannot gauge, which all your retorts and chemical tests cannot resolve into its component parts. And let me tell you, Sims, in the modern aviator there lives the spirit of the adventurers of all time; a gallant, intrepid and invincible army that comes marching down the gray ages to be reincarnated as the greatest of all the cavaliers of chance.
“For centuries they have been crusaders; they have sailed uncharted seas; they have braved killing heat and searing cold. They have fought the dragons of every age and clime, wrestling with the earth for jewels and gold, building glittering cities in desert places, throwing fairy bridges from crag to crag. Now, spurning the reclaimed earth, they have taken their indomitable courage and their boundless enthusiasm, Sims, into the limitless sea of the air, whose currents and eddies and tempests are more treacherous and terrible than ever beset any ocean.”
He had been tapping his words out on Doctor Sims’ bony knee. Suddenly realizing an acute discomfort there, Doctor Sims removed the knee abruptly, and looked up at David.
“Now you,” he remarked, ignoring his brother educator’s dissertation. “You’re planning to be a big newspaper man, aren’t you? Eh?”
“Why, no, sir,” said David.
“Automobile tires, then—automobile tires,” Doctor Sims cut in.
He seemed about to launch on a tirade against tires, and David spoke quickly. “I am an aviator,” he said, “and I want to thank Doctor Trigg for what he just said. It is all true;” and looking at the doctor with a light bow, he added, “and it is pretty fine for us youngsters to feel that men like you understand us, and are with us.” He smiled the smile that always won friends for him, and passed on into the little hallway.
Behind him he could hear Doctor Trigg burst into a loud cackle. He knew, without looking, that Professor Sims was dodging a skinny finger.