The Homer Crawford she had first known was an easier going man than he who had snapped an abrupt order to her a moment ago. The Homer she had first known requested things of his teammates and friends. El Hassan had learned to command.
The Homer she had first known could never have ridden, roughshod, over the basically gentle Dr. Smythe.
The Homer she had first known, when the El Hassan scheme was still aborning, had thought of himself as a member of a team. He was quick to ask advice of all, and quick to take it if it had validity. Now Homer, as El Hassan, was depending less and less upon the opinions of those surrounding him, more and more upon his own decisions which he seemed to sometimes reach purely through intuition.
The El Hassan dream was still upon her, but, womanlike, she wondered if she liked the would-be tyrant of all North Africa as well as she had once liked the easy-going American idealist, Homer Crawford.
Jack and Jimmy Peters, the brothers from Trinidad, entered, the former carrying a couple of books.
They'd evidently failed to note the raised voices and wore their customary serious expressions. Jack looked at Homer and said, "_Cu vi scias Esperanton?_"
Homer Crawford's eyebrows went up but he said, "_Jes, mi parolas Esperanto tre bona, mi pensas._"
Moroka was scowling back and forth from one of them to the other. "I thought I had a fairly good working knowledge of the world's more common languages," he said, "but that goes by me. It sounds like a cross between Italian and pig-Latin."
Homer said to the Peters brothers, "Let's drop Esperanto so that Dave, Isobel and Cliff can follow us. We can give it a whirl later, if you'd like, just for the practice."
Isobel said slowly, "_Mi parolas Esperanto, malgranda_." Then in English, "I took it for kicks while I was still in school. Kind of rusty now, though."
"Esperanto?" Cliff said. "You mean that gobblydygook so-called international language?"
Jack Peters looked at him, serious faced as always. "What is wrong with an international language, Mr. Jackson?"
Cliff was taken aback. "Search me. But it doesn't seem to have proved very practical. It didn't catch on."
"Well, more than you might think," Isobel told him. "There are probably hundreds of thousands of persons in one part of the world or another who can get along in Esperanto."