but even if i ca n't , i shall of course continue to run the company for as long as you wish provided , as we have discussed before , that i can take a day or two off here and there to attend to business in the u.k. '' that was already agreed , he said , and we finished off the food and the wine and we shook hands and he disappeared back into his own private world , inhabited no doubt by other members of the cold-blooded , lung-breathing vertebrates of the species reptilia .