Baltazar went to the open dining-room window, and presently saw Godfrey clamber into his little two-seater. He waved a hand.
“Good luck!”
“See you on Friday, sir.”
The car drove off. Quong Ho returned to the dining-room.
“I think, sir,” said he, “that we have just parted from a happy young man.”
“If a man’s not happy when he gets his heart’s desire at twenty-one,” said Baltazar, “he had better apply for transference to another planet. I threw mine away,” he added in a tone of reminiscence. “Wilfully. I ought to have been Senior Wrangler. But I was a fool. I was always taking false steps. That’s the wonderful thing about Godfrey, Quong Ho, as doubtless you’ve noticed—he always takes the right steps. A marvellously well-balanced mind.” He smiled in a meditative way, thanking Heaven for sparing Godfrey those storms of temperament in which he had so often suffered shipwreck. A steady chap, disciplined, not to be turned out of his course. “Well, well,” said he, “now from refreshment to labour. Come upstairs and let us get on with the work.”
It was the long vacation, and Quong Ho, tireless and devoted, was replacing Baltazar’s secretary absent on a much-needed holiday. A busy afternoon lay before them. That evening the week’s number of The New Universe must go to press; the final proofs be passed, modifying footnotes added to bring statements and arguments up to the hour’s date, so swift were the kaleidoscopic variations in the confused world-condition; and Baltazar’s own editional summary, the dynamo of the powerful periodical, had to be finished.
They sat in Baltazar’s library, at the orderly piled writing-table, very much as they had sat, a year ago, in the scholarly room at Spendale Farm. But now no longer as master and humorously treated pupil. The years of training had borne excellent fruit, and Quong Ho proved himself to be an invaluable colleague; so much so that Baltazar, at times, cursed the University of Cambridge for depriving him, for the greater part of the year, of one of the most subtle brains in the kingdom. Quong Ho could point unerringly to a fallacy in an argument; he seemed to be infallible on questions of fact in war politics; and such a meticulously accurate proof-corrector had never been born. In such a light at least did his rara avis appear to Baltazar. They worked in silence. Baltazar furiously inditing his article, Quong Ho, pen in hand, intent on the proofs. The open window admitted the London sounds of the warm summer afternoon. Presently Baltazar rose and cast off coat and waistcoat, and with a sigh of relief at the coolness of shirt-sleeves, sat down again.
“Why don’t you do the same?”
Quong Ho, impeccably attired in a dark suit and a high stiff collar, replied that he did not feel the heat.