"Well, you wont be if you knock my drink over with your hairy hoofs—sit still!"
"It'd do you good if I did knock it over—your hoary-headed old rip. Guns, do you think they'll have raised our pay in a hundred years' time?"
"I doubt it. They'll pay off the Navy and economise as soon as peace is signed—"
"—And we'll have another war on our hands inside six months—we always do; we've always retrenched after a war, and then had to give bonuses to get the men back inside a year."
"Well, they'll pay off the battleships, anyway—and only keep the fast cruisers and the submarines."
"You and your submarines! Have you heard from your brother lately?"
"Yes, he tells me if I'm going to join I've got to remember it's the greatest honour to be—half a sec., I've got the letter here—to be alive and able to get into the greatest and most efficient Service of the Greatest Navy the world has ever seen, in the Greatest event in History since the Moon broke off."
There was a two seconds' silence (which is long for a Naval discussion), then—
"Well, cutting out the swollen-headed tosh about the Greatest Service, which I take it he means to refer to submarines, I don't know that he's far wrong."
"Well, I suppose we shall have our pasts and presents all looked up, and that people at the U.S. Institution will argue about us like they did a few years ago about Trafalgar."