"Do I understand none, Doctor?"
"You do, sir. My patients breathe in cubic feet, and swallow their doses in grains, and have their inflation measured in inches."
"Now there again!" exclaimed Augustus, cheerily. "More antiquity to be swept away! And people say we young officers have no work cut out for us!"
"Patients don't die then under the metric system?" said the Doctor.
"No wonder Europe's overcrowded," said Starr.
But the student's mind inhabited heights above such trifling. "Death," he said, "occurs in ratios not differentiated from our statistics." And he told them much more while they looked at him over their plates. He managed to say modernity and differentiate again, for he came from our middle West, where they encounter education too suddenly, and it would take three generations of him to speak clean English. But with all his polysyllabic wallowing, he showed himself keen-minded, pat with authorities, a spruce young graduate among these dingy Rocky Mountain campaigners. They had fought and thirsted and frozen; the books he knew were not written when they went to school; and so far as war is to be mastered on paper, his equipment was full and polished when theirs was meagre and rusty.
And yet, if you know things that other and older men do not, it is as well not to mention them too hastily. These soldiers wished they could have been taught what he knew; but they watched young Augustus unfolding himself with a gaze that might have seemed chill to a less highly abstract thinker. He, however, rose from the table pleasantly edified by himself and hopeful for them. And as he left them, "Good-night, ladies and gentlemen," he said; "we shall meet again."
"Oh, yes," said the Doctor. "Again and again."
"He's given me indigestion," said Bainbridge.
"Take some metric system," said Starr.