"Yes, Captain, he understood it as well as either of us the whole time.

Intelligence, not indifference, caused him to interrupt.
Wonderful fellow!" "That's the kind of a man I am!" replied Ardan, not without some degree of complacency.

Then he added simply: "Barbican, my friend, if I understand your explanations so readily, attribute it all to their astonishing lucidity.

If I have any faculity, it is that of being able to scent common sense at the first glimmer.

Your sentences are so steeped in it that I catch their full meaning long before you end them--hence my apparent inattention.