“I can’t quite figure out how you sold me that set.”
“Why,” he said consolingly, “I sold J. P. Morgan a set.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said.
He wasn’t angry. He simply said, “Honest, I did.”
“A set of Walter Scott to J. P. Morgan, who not only has some fine editions but probably the original manuscripts of some of the novels as well?”
“Well, here’s his John Hancock.” And he promptly flashed on me a contract signed by J. P. Morgan himself. It might not have been Mr. Morgan’s signature, but it did not occur to me to doubt it at the time. Didn’t he have mine in his pocket? All I felt was curiosity. So I asked him, “How did you get past the librarian?”
“I didn’t see any librarian. I saw the Old Man himself. In the office.”
“That’s too much!” I said. Everybody knew that it was much harder to get into Mr. Morgan’s private office empty handed than into the White House with a parcel that ticked like an alarm clock.
But he declared, “I did.”
“But how did you get into his office?”