"Don't do it," put in Dorothy, positively. "He's just too perfect the way he is. Especially don't do it if he'd talk the way you do--or could you teach him to talk the way you write?"
"Ouch! That's a dirty dig. However, Mrs. Seaton, I am able and willing to defend my customary mode of speech. You realize that the spoken word is ephemeral, whereas the thought, whose nuances have once been expressed in imperishable print is not subject to revision--its crudities can never be remodeled into more subtle, more gracious shading. It is my contention that, due to these inescapable conditions, the mental effort necessitated by the employment of nice distinctions in sense and meaning of words and a slavish adherence to the dictates of the more precise grammarians should be reserved for the print...."
He broke off as Dorothy, in one lithe motion, rose and hurled her pillow at his head.
"Choke him, somebody! Perhaps you had better build it, Dick, after all."
"I believe that he would like it, Dick. He is trying hard to learn, and the continuous use of a dictionary is undoubtedly a nuisance to him."
"You have call, sir?" Shiro entered the room from his galley, with his unfailing bow.
"Yes. How'd you like to learn to talk English like Crane there does--without taking lessons?"
Shiro smiled doubtfully, unable to take such a thought seriously.
"Yes, it can be done," Crane assured him. "Doctor Seaton can build a machine which will teach you all at once, if you like."
"I like, sir, enormously, yes, sir. I years study and pore, but honorable English extraordinary difference from Nipponese--no can do. Dictionary useful but ..." he flipped pages dexterously, "extremely cumbrous. If honorable Seaton can do, shall be extreme ... gratification."
"I'll do just that little thing. So long, folks, I'm going up to the shop."
Day after day the _Skylark_ plunged through the vast emptiness of the interstellar reaches. At the end of each second she was traveling exactly twenty-six feet per second faster than she had been at its beginning; and as day after day passed, her velocity mounted into figures which became meaningless, even when expressed in thousands of miles per second. Still she seemed stationary to her occupants, and only different from a vessel motionless upon the surface of the Earth in that objects within her hull had lost three-sixteenths of their normal weight. Acceleration, too, had its effect. Only the rapidity with which the closer suns and their planets were passed gave any indication of the frightful speed at which they were being hurtled along by the inconceivable power of that disintegrating copper bar.