"It doesn't seem now as though we should," you return. "But do you remember?—we talked the same way when we were coming home before. What will it be two years hence?"
"True," he says. "And of course there's Conan Doyle. He always thinks he's never going to do it any more. But in a year or so Sherlock Holmes pops out again, drawn by Freddy Steele, all over the cover of 'Collier's.' Not that your stuff is as good as Doyle's, but that the general case is somewhat parallel."
"Doyle has killed Holmes," you put in.
"Yes," he agrees, "and several times you've almost killed me."
Then as the train speeds scornfully through Newark, without stopping, he catches sight of a vast concrete building—a warehouse of some kind, apparently.
"Look!" he cries. "Isn't it wonderful?"
"That building?"
"Not the building itself. The thought that we don't have to get off here and go through it. Think what it would be like if we were on our travels! There would be a lot of citizens in frock coats. Probably the mayor would be there, too. They would drive us to that building, and take us in, and then they would cry if we refused to go to the fourteenth floor, where they keep the dried prunes."
The train slips across the Jersey meadows and darts into the tunnel.
"Now," he remarks hopefully, "we are really going to get home—if this tunnel doesn't drop in on us."