Thought Baltazar: “If I tell him the real reason, he’ll turn into a pillar of frozen don.” Besides, he had not the faintest intention of opening his soul to Sheepshanks, even though the latter should have enacted the part of the father of the Prodigal Son. He waved the question aside.
“Nothing of any importance. Just one of the idiot trifles that always seem to arise and deflect my course through life. The main point is that I found the place I wanted, and went there with Quong Ho.”
Luncheon had been cleared away and he had finished a couple of pipes before he came to the end of his narrative.
“So now you see my position,” said he.
“I think I do,” replied Sheepshanks.
“My whole life-work has gone—except that part of it which exists in the cultivated brain of my remarkable young Chinaman. There seems to be no place for me in London, where everybody’s fitted into the war, where I’m simply dazed and unwanted. So I’ve come here—if only to find something left of my old life to attach myself to.”
“I’m afraid there’s not very much to be done in Cambridge,” said Sheepshanks. “It’s no longer a university, but a military camp.”
“But at any rate,” said Baltazar, “I can find here a few human beings I know who might put me in the way of actual things—help me on my course.”
“That’s quite possible,” said Sheepshanks.
“I also have to see what can be done for Quong Ho. I want him to come up next term. Has the college ever had an undergraduate who has come up with a knowledge of Elliptic Functions?”