Mr. Brett looked at him with satisfaction. He liked John, and he liked pleasing him, but he knew that he wasn’t going on pleasing him. He waited for his bad moment with the same unshaken placidity with which he waited for his good ones. There was no homely truth of which Mr. Brett was fonder, or more content to practise, than that of taking the rough with the smooth. “If I come to pieces over it,” John demanded, “or if I get cold feet, can I come over and see you? There’s such a lot of things to plan and think of—you’ve given me such powers, and the plans themselves are so big—I almost hesitate to undertake them, and yet I’d rather do it than anything else in the world!” “You can come over and see me as long as I’m there,” said Mr. Brett cautiously. “But you won’t need to. You go into your own brain and pick at that. You’ve got a-plenty. “I’ve studied the English mind some, since I’ve been over here, and I guess I’ve spotted what’s wrong with it. It’s as lazy as a dog! You don’t use what you’ve got: maybe you’re frightened it would look showy, maybe you’re so stuck on behaving the way you weren’t made that you’re afraid your wits will let you down into behaving the way you were made; but you’ve got wits. “Look at your navy! When I read your newspapers I could cry. When I talk to your high-brows I could laugh—and when I hear the muddles your Government is liable to slide into, I wonder any of you are alive. But when I look at your navy I see the whole thing as clear as glass. Are there any folk—even the showiest broker in Wall Street, or the latest quick-thinking Jap—that acts more like a live wire than the lieutenant of one of your destroyers? Are there any men who see cooler and clearer than one of your young admirals? Or I might say, one of your infant middies—for they’re all as clear-eyed and hard-headed as professional burglars! No, Sir, you can’t find men in any country quicker or more spry than your naval officers. And why is it? I figure it out this way—they got to be. Sea fighting is like operatic singing, you haven’t one thing to think of, you have half a dozen—pace, sight, signals, men, guns, the sea. The sea does it. Men need all their sap to face the sea. You can’t soss down and get into a habit with it. You can’t trust to a prejudice, you got to change your mind and your behaviour as quick as a north-east gale. “Well, John—if a man _can_ do a thing when he’s got to—all you have to do is to apply the emergency and take away his props.