"Perhaps," with the old smile.
"But after all it is now more than three years since we have had a talk on the Tube. After it began to function as well as the Air-Express you sort of lost interest in it."
"And the world did too."
"Certainly—but the public ever was a fickle mistress. Who said that before me?"
He laughed and blew out a long puff of smoke.
"Everyone, Bob."
"But as to the Tube, if I cross under the sea, I would want to be as well informed on the road as I was three years ago. Now in the meantime, you have dropped interest in the long tunnel while I have become more interested in textiles—with the result that I have forgotten all I ever did know—which compared to your grasp of the details, was little enough."
But his face showed none of the old-time animation on the subject. What a different man, I mused to myself, from that enthusiastic engineering student that I used to come upon dreaming over his blue-prints. He was considered "half-cracked" in those days when he would enthuse over his undersea railroad, but his animated face was lit with inspiration. Now the light was gone.
"Well, Dutch, how about it? Aren't you going to make me that brief little sketch of the length plan and cross-section of the Tube? I remember your sketch of it in college, and it tends to confuse me with the real changes that were made necessary when the wind-propulsion method was adopted."