I’m afraid I stared at Florey. I had lived too long in the forest: the staring habit, so disconcerting to tenderfeet on their first acquaintance with the mountain people, was surely upon me. I think that the school of the forest teaches, first of all, to look long and sharply while you have a chance. The naturalist who follows the trail of wild game, even the sportsman knows this same fact—for the wild creatures are incredibly furtive and give one only a second’s glimpse. I instinctively tried to learn all I could of the gray old servant in the instant that I shook his hand. He was the butler, now and forever, and I [Pg 25]wondered if, beneath that gray skin, he were really human at all. Did he know human passion, human ambition and desires: sheltered in his master’s house, was he set apart from the lusts and the madnesses, the calms and the storms, the triumphs and the defeats that made up the lives of other men? Yet his gray, rather dim old eyes told me nothing. There were no fires, visible to me, glowing in their depths. A human clam—better still, a gray mole that lives out his life in darkness. [Pg 25] From him we passed up the stairs and to a big, cool study that apparently joined his bedroom. There were desks and chairs and a letter file. Edith Nealman was writing at the typewriter. If I had ever supposed that the girl had taken the position of her uncle’s secretary merely as a girlish whim, or in some emergency until a permanent secretary could be secured, I was swiftly disillusioned. There was nothing of the amateur in the way her supple fingers flew over the keys. She had evidently had training in a business college; and her attitude towards Nealman was simply that of a secretary towards her employer. She leaned back as if waiting for orders. “You can go, if you like, Edith,” Nealman [Pg 26]told her. “I’m going to talk awhile with Killdare, here, and you wouldn’t be able to work anyway.” [Pg 26] She got up; and she threw me a smile of welcome and friendliness as she walked out the study door. [Pg 27] [Pg 27]
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