"Hump, I have studied some grammar in my time, and I think your tenses are tangled.

'Was mine,' you should have said, not 'is mine.'" "It is a question, not of grammar, but of ethics," I answered.
It was possibly a minute before he spoke.
"D'ye know, Hump," he said, with a slow seriousness which had in it an indefinable strain of sadness, "that this is the first time I have heard the word 'ethics' in the mouth of a man.

You and I are the only men on this ship who know its meaning." "At one time in my life," he continued, after another pause, "I dreamed that I might some day talk with men who used such language, that I might lift myself out of the place in life in which I had been born, and hold conversation and mingle with men who talked about just such things as ethics.

And this is the first time I have ever heard the word pronounced.

Which is all by the way, for you are wrong.