‘And what is the appointment you have got?’ he asked at length, dismissing his own affairs with impatience.

It was that of mathematical lecturer at a London college.

’I shall have a hundred and fifty a year, and be able to take private pupils.  On two hundred, at least, I can count, and there are possibilities I won’t venture to speak of, because it doesn’t do to be too hopeful.  Two hundred a year is a great advance for me.’

‘Quite enough, I suppose,’ said Everard kindly.

‘Not—­not enough.  I must make a little more somehow.’

‘Hollo!  Why this spirit of avarice all at once?’

The mathematician gave a shrill, cackling laugh, and rolled upon his chair.

’I must have more than two hundred.  I should be satisfied with three hundred, but I’ll take as much more as I can get.’

’My revered tutor, this is shameless.  I came to pay my respects to a philosopher, and I find a sordid worldling.  Look at me!  I am a man of the largest needs, spiritual and physical, yet I make my pittance of four hundred and fifty suffice, and never grumble.  Perhaps you aim at an income equal to my own?’

’I do!  What’s four hundred and fifty?  If you were a man of enterprise you would double or treble it.  I put a high value on money.  I wish to be rich!’

‘You are either mad or are going to get married.’

Micklethwaite cackled louder than ever.

’I am planning a new algebra for school use.  If I’m not much mistaken, I can turn out something that will supplant all the present books.  Think!  If Micklethwaite’s Algebra got accepted in all the schools, what would that mean to Mick?  Hundreds a year, my boy—­hundreds.’

‘I never knew you so indecent.’

’I am renewing my youth.  Nay, for the first time I am youthful.  I never had time for it before.  At the age of sixteen I began to teach in a school, and ever since I have pegged away at it, school and private.  Now luck has come to me, and I feel five-and-twenty.  When I was really five-and-twenty, I felt forty.’

‘Well, what has that to do with money-making?’

’After Mick’s Algebra would follow naturally Mick’s Arithmetic, Mick’s Euclid, Mick’s Trigonometry.  Twenty years hence I should have an income of thousands—­thousands!  I would then cease to teach (resign my professorship—­that is to say, for of course I should be professor), and devote myself to a great work on Probability.  Many a man has begun the best of his life at sixty—­the most enjoyable part of it, I mean.’

Barfoot was perplexed.  He knew his friend’s turn for humorous exaggeration, but had never once heard him scheme for material advancement, and evidently this present talk meant something more than a jest.

‘Am I right or not?  You are going to get married?’

Micklethwaite glanced at the door, then said in a tone of caution,—­