Perhaps, had I met him by chance six months ago, my undeveloped soul would have resented his easy familiarity with a cubbish snarl or two. Now my receptives were awakened; my armor of self-sufficiency eaten to rags with rust; my heart plaintive for communion with some larger influence that would recognize and not abhor.
At 8:45 he haled me off to the office, which stood a brief distance away, in a thoroughfare called Great Queen street. Here he left me awhile, bidding me walk up and down and observe life until his chief should arrive, which he was due to do at the half-hour.
I thought it a dull street after some I had seen, but there were many old book and curiosity shops in it that aroused my interest. While I was looking into one of them I heard Duke call.
“Here,” he said, when I reached him; “answer out and I think Ripley will give you work. I’m rather a favorite with him—that’s the truth.”
He led me into a low-browed room, with a counter. Great bales of print and paper went up to the ceiling at the back, and the floor rumbled with the clank of subterranean machinery. One or two clerks were about and wedged into a corner of the room was a sort of glazed and wooden crate of comfortable proportions, which was, in fact, the chapel of ease of the minister of the place.
Into this den Duke conducted me with ceremony, and, retreating himself, left me almost tumbling over a bald-headed man, with a matted black beard, on which a protruding red upper lip lay like a splash of blood, who sat at a desk writing.
“Shut the door,” he said, without looking up.
“It is shut, sir.”
He trailed a glance at me, as if in scrutiny, but I soon saw he could only have been balancing some phrase, for he dived again and went on writing.
Presently he said, very politely, indeed, and still intent on his paper: “Are you a cadet of the noble family of Kinsale, sir?”