"Very well, touch him." Then he added: "But where can you do it ?" "Under the fifth rib!" Mr.Pinhorn stared.

"Where's that ?" "You want me to go down and see him ?" I asked when I had enjoyed his visible search for the obscure suburb I seemed to have named.
"I don't 'want' anything--the proposal's your own.

But you must remember that that's the way we do things _now_," said Mr.Pinhorn with another dig Mr.Deedy.
Unregenerate as I was I could read the queer implications of this speech.
The present owner's superior virtue as well as his deeper craft spoke in his reference to the late editor as one of that baser sort who deal in false representations.

Mr.Deedy would as soon have sent me to call on Neil Paraday as he would have published a "holiday-number"; but such scruples presented themselves as mere ignoble thrift to his successor, whose own sincerity took the form of ringing door-bells and whose definition of genius was the art of finding people at home.

It was as if Mr.Deedy had published reports without his young men's having, as Pinhorn would have said, really been there.