“De Lesseps be damned!” he retorted sourly. “Look at these.”
He held out his hands, hardened with manual toil—the hands of a grinder.
“Clearly you are a glutton for work,” I said.
“I am aiming at never doing another hand’s stroke in my life,” he replied, with an odd glint in his blue eyes. “My idea of life—life, mind you, not mere existence—is to be a pasha—one of the old school, with gate porters, orange trees, fountains, slaves, mosaic pavements, a marble bath.”
He mixed his ambitions oddly.
“Someone to do all the shifting for me, and even the thinking; to hold a book in front of me if I wanted to read, to poke my pipe in my mouth, and to take it out when I wanted to blow smoke rings—and to know when I wanted it taken out without being told.”
“On your showing, you are traveling by the wrong road.”
“Am I?” he snapped viciously. “Just wait awhile.”
That was all the indication I had of Dunlap’s ideas, and remembering the time of night and other circumstances, I did not count upon it worth a brass farthing; putting it down to the heather-dew rather than to any innate viciousness of the man. But listen to the sequel, which shifts us up just about twelve months, to the spring of the following year, in fact.