"Doubtless the roads," he began.
"Roads!" said the other. "Mud-holes. No, we left Washington later than I intended. Well, have you got the house for me?"
Reed offered his client a cigar.
"No, thank you, prefer my cigarette if you don't mind."
Reed did not mind in the least. The real estate business in Vestalia was never brilliant, and several weeks' profits might easily have been expended in one friendly smoke.
His client was a man under thirty, of a type that used to be considered typically American—that is to say, Anglo-Saxon, modified by a century or so of New England climate and conscience. His ancestors had been sailors, perhaps, and years of exposure had tanned their skins and left their eyes as blue as ever. His movements had the gentleness characteristic of men who are much with horses, and though he was active and rather lightly built, he never was sudden or jerky in any gesture. Something of this same quietness might be detected in his mental attitude. People sometimes thought him hesitating or undecided on questions about which his mind was irrevocably made up. He took a certain friendly interest in life as a whole, and would listen with such patience to an expression of opinion that the expresser of it was often surprised to find the opinion had had no weight with him, whatsoever.
He stood now, listening with the politest attention to Reed's somewhat flowery description of the charms of the Revelly house—charms which Crane himself had examined in the minutest detail.
"Never before," exclaimed the real estate agent, in a magnificent peroration, "never before has the splendid mansion been rented—"
"Ah," said Crane with a smile, "I believe you there."
"Never been offered for rent," corrected the real estate agent, with a cough. "Its delightful colonial flavor—"