came almost daily to see him, the inventor would not
only have listened to your wants, no matter how absorbed
he might have been in his own work, but he
would not have allowed you to leave him until he
was sure that your mind was at rest.

Had you, however, been neither friend nor client,
but some unbeliever fresh from the gossip of the Club,
where many of the habitues not only laughed at the
inventor's predictions for the future, but often lost
their tempers in discussing his revolutionary ideas; or
had you, in a spirit of temerity, entered his room
armed with arguments for his overthrow, nothing that
your good-breeding or the lack of it would have permitted
you to have said could have ruffled his gentle
spirit. With the tact of a man of wide experience
among men, he would have turned the talk into another
channel--music, perhaps, or some topic of the
day--and all with such exquisite grace that you
would have forgotten the subject you came to discuss
until you found yourself outside the yard and half-
way across Kennedy Square before realizing that the
inventor had made no reply to your attacks.

But whoever you might have been, whether the
friend of years, the anxious client, or the trifling
unbeliever, and whatever the purpose of your visit,
whether to shake his hand again for the very delight
of touching it, to seek advice, or to combat his theories,
you would have carried away the impression of a man