“You women stick together.” Trenter could not but admire the trait.
“And you men stick at nothing.” Eleanor’s sincerity gave sanction to inconsequence. “She’s too good for him. I suppose you’re both off on some gallivanting business? So far as I am concerned you’re welcome! You’ve been an experience, and every girl ought to have experience—up to a point. Your wife can have you.”
“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you forty million times that I’m not married!” hissed Trenter. “I had to be married because he wanted a married man for a butler, and if I’d said I was single I should have lost the job. That temper of yours, my girl, is going to be your ruin.”
“Well, don’t talk disp—whatever the word is—about Miss Diana,” she sulked.
“I don’t trouble my head about her, because I don’t think there’s anybody in the world like you, Eleanor,” he urged.
She admitted later that there was much to be said for his point of view.
CHAPTER IX
In the early days, when Trenter had known him, Mr. Superbus was a court bailiff, a man who seized the property of unsuccessful litigants, who served writs, attached furniture, and committed all those barbarous acts peculiar to his office. But progression, the inexorable law of getting on, the natural craving for success, brought Mr. Superbus from the atmosphere of a dull county court to a small office in the Insurance Trust Building, and the distinction of having his name painted upon the glass panel of the door. He was officially styled “First Enquiry Clerk.” The “detective” which was printed on the corner of his visiting card was wholly unofficial, and his request to his superiors that a nickel badge should be designed that he might wear on his waistcoat and display at fitting moments when it was necessary to disclose his identity, was refused as being “impracticable and undesirable.”
The cinematograph is at once educative and inspirational. Mr. Superbus spent most of his spare evenings in watching the pictures. Those he liked best dealt with the careers of young, beautiful but penurious girls, who were pursued by rich and remorseless villains, and were rescued in the nick of time from a fate which is popularly supposed to be worse than death, by a handsome young hero, with the assistance of a stern-faced officer of the law, who smoked cigars, wore a derby hat, and from time to time turned back his coat to display the badge of his calling. A film which had no detective, and dealt merely with the love of a millionaire’s beautiful young wife for his secretary, was unpalatable to him, even though it featured his favourite artists and showed, in the course of its telling, tremendous railway accidents, landslides, riots and the enervating effects of cocaine.
Before the open window of his parlour, Mr. Superbus sat in a state of profound meditation. Though the day was chilly, he was in his shirt-sleeves, for he was one of those hot-blooded men in whom the variations of climate peculiar to his native land produced no effect. It was an open secret that he was one of those hardy souls who swam in the Serpentine every Christmas Day, preferably breaking the ice to get in, and his portrait appeared with monotonous regularity every twenty-sixth of December in all the better-class illustrated newspapers.