Music is one of the Commander's passions, and, as I say, that Slater band was not too bad. I think it was the "_Valse Triste_" that sent him off into a reverie. The young creature who played the fiddle had bobbed hair and was rather an attractive sort of sylph, and the Commander's blue eyes with the dark dots in them were fixed on her intricately-moving fingers. Then he came out of his musing with a sudden jerk. What I especially like about Hubbard is that he usually knows what you want to know, and does not cease to feel the working of your mind even through a longish silence. "Extraordinary thing," were his words as he came out of that silence. "It seems to be like the wind--blows whither it listeth. You look for it where you'd expect it and it isn't there, and then up it pops in a place you'd never think of looking for it." This sounded to me rather like some of my own Publicity conclusions; but "What does?" I prompted him. "Oh, the fluence--the gism--the real stuff--the thing you know when you see it but haven't got a name for," he replied off-handedly. "I suppose you writer-fellows call it genius.... How old's Smith? Twenty-four I should say, so it isn't a matter of accumulated experience. He couldn't be more dead right if he was a hundred-and-four." "Right about what?" "Well, about his job. Aviation. What it's for, just as much as ever now the War's over." "Tell me--but remember I'm a journalist." "All the better," he replied promptly. "The more you rub it in the better. The War only ended a few months ago, but a good many people seem to be trying to think there's never been one. That's right enough from the economic point of view, of course--gets people back to work again--but there is the other side, and I wish you would rub it in." "Well, what do you want rubbed in?" The eyes that had caught mine in Esdaile's studio rested on my face again now. Then he pulled out a fat cigarette. "Civil aviation's for War, of course--the next War," he said almost contemptuously. "You're not one of those who think it's for express-letters, are you? Or carrying a cheap-jack Bradford agent to make a dicker in wool? That's where so many of you newspaper fellows make the mistake. You're all so clever at disguising the truth. You don't take people into your confidence enough." Professionally this began to interest me. The public, its interests and its confidence are supposed to be my business. "Go on," I said.