I was calling on ——, Treasurer of ——, in his new bank, not long ago—a hushed, reverent place with a dome up over it and no windows on this wicked world—a kind of heavenly minded way of being lighted from above. It seemed to be a kind of Church for Money.
"This is new," I said, "since I've been away. Who built it?"
—— mentioned the name of Non-Gregarious as if I had never heard of him.
I said nothing. And he began to tell me how Non built the bank. He said he had wanted Non from the first, but that the directors had been set against it.
And the more he told the directors about Non, he said, the more set they were. They kept offering a good many rather vague objections, and for a long time he could not really make them out.
Finally he got it. All the objections boiled down to one.
Non was too good to be true. If there was a man like Non in this world, they said, they would have heard about it before.
When I was telling ex-Mayor ——, in ——, about Non, the first time, he interrupted me and asked me if I would mind his ringing for his stenographer. He was a trustee and responsible, either directly or indirectly, for hundreds of buildings, and he wanted the news in writing.
Of course there must be something the matter with it, he said, but he wanted it to be true, if it could, and as the bare chance of its being true would be very important to him, he was going to have it looked up.