"I can't say I have; but then I'm rather at a disadvantage in not knowing your friend. Tell me something about him."
"Well—what, for example?"
"As I know nothing you can't go far wrong," I replied.
Music is one of the Commander's passions, and, as I say, that Slater band was not too bad. I think it was the "Valse Triste" that sent him off into a reverie. The young creature who played the fiddle had bobbed hair and was rather an attractive sort of sylph, and the Commander's blue eyes with the dark dots in them were fixed on her intricately-moving fingers.
Then he came out of his musing with a sudden jerk. What I especially like about Hubbard is that he usually knows what you want to know, and does not cease to feel the working of your mind even through a longish silence.
"Extraordinary thing," were his words as he came out of that silence. "It seems to be like the wind—blows whither it listeth. You look for it where you'd expect it and it isn't there, and then up it pops in a place you'd never think of looking for it."
This sounded to me rather like some of my own Publicity conclusions; but "What does?" I prompted him.
"Oh, the fluence—the gism—the real stuff—the thing you know when you see it but haven't got a name for," he replied off-handedly. "I suppose you writer-fellows call it genius.... How old's Smith? Twenty-four I should say, so it isn't a matter of accumulated experience. He couldn't be more dead right if he was a hundred-and-four."
"Right about what?"
"Well, about his job. Aviation. What it's for, just as much as ever now the War's over."