“Oh, do; I shall be glad.”
“It won’t disturb you? I mean, won’t dissipate your inspirations?”
Tracy laughed and said they were not ethereal enough to be very easily discommoded.
The colonel asked a number of cautious and well-considered questions—questions which seemed pretty odd and flighty to Tracy—but the answers conveyed the information desired, apparently, for the colonel said to himself, with mixed pride and gratification:
“It’s a good job as far as I’ve got with it. He’s solid. Solid and going to last, solid as the real thing.”
“It’s wonderful—wonderful. I believe I could—petrify him.” After a little he asked, warily “Do you prefer being here, or—or there?”
“There? Where?”
“Why—er—where you’ve been?”
Tracy’s thought flew to his boarding-house, and he answered with decision.
“Oh, here, much!”