"Neither, thank you. When I have business to discuss I never touch liquor," he replied, with a most meaning emphasis upon the latter half of his statement, albeit politely enough. I inwardly resented hearing Bass's ale, or whiskey and soda for that matter, described as "liquor."
"Bring a bottle of Bass and a lemonade," I said to the porter, without consulting my companion further. "You must drink something," I added by way of apology. Actually I was under the impression that sweet lemonade would nauseate a grown man, if taken so soon after dinner. I wanted revenge for that word "liquor."
"Thanks—a lemonade is just a thing," he responded enthusiastically. "It's a very refreshing drink on a warm evening. You are very kind—have one of my cigars?" and he produced a black, oily looking object named after some Spanish infanta and having about the same figure as one of those estimable princesses. Now I felt toward a black cigar on a hot, stuffy train, when business was to be talked, about as he did toward "liquor"—and the similarity made me smile again. After all, our prejudices were the same, but involved different details. The lemonade arrived, he bit his aromatic monster, puffed it luxuriously, waved his glass ceremoniously at me, and took a deep draft of the sweet liquid, copiously mixed with Havana smoke. My glass of Bass, on the way to my lips, paused, and I shuddered. I began to wish, like Hamlet, that I had tried some other plan of revenge for that foul epithet "liquor."
"Now we are all set," he announced cheerily, which was more than I was sure my dinner was, but I said nothing. "Have you thought about the dimensions?" he continued.
"Of what?" I asked, my mind still on the problem of a compound of cigar and lemonade.
"The testing-laboratory, of course!" There was just a trace of irritation in his tone. I made a guilty effort to pull myself together.
"No, I haven't. But I've a list in my trunk of the machinery we need and the floor space it occupies. It's easy enough to figure it out from that."
"In your trunk!" he said in an awful voice. "Then what's the use of talking about it tonight?"
"That's what I wondered," I remarked amiably, "but I thought perhaps you had some ideas on the subject."
I could see from his expression that I had made a bad start. His face was sharp, keen, shrewd, but not at all intellectual. His eyes were bright and beady, and I knew, as I looked at him, that, for all his alert keenness and shrewdness, he knew nothing about anything except the business he had been taught. The latter he knew with an almost ferocious accuracy. On a specific engineering problem in his own field it would be hard to match him, but on constructive ideas which involved applying what he knew to broader questions—I had my doubts. There was no imagination, no background on which to build. I began to see my father's method in picking such an associate for me. On details this man couldn't go wrong—he would keep my part of the work practical, whereas I knew I was relied upon to see in what new paths this manufacturing company could be made to expand and develop. But first I had to learn the business. Therefore, as the present arrangement stood, I was my companion's subordinate.