“Thank you very much,” said Olcott, a bit amused inwardly, and a bit impressed also by the air of mouldy grandeur which the other diffused. “Won't you sit down, Mr. Van Nicht?”
“I shall be able to tarry but a short while.” The big voice boomed out of the little dried-up body as the old man took the chair which Olcott had indicated. He took only part of it. He poised himself on the forward edge of its seat, holding his spine very erect and dramatising his posture with a stiff and stately investure.
Olcott caught himself telling himself Morgan had been right: This personage was not really flesh and blood, but something out of a book—an embodied bit of fiction. Why even his language had the stilted shaping of the characters in most of these old-timey classical novels.
“He wasn't really born at all,” Olcott thought. “Dickens wrote him and then Cruikshank drew him and now here he is, miraculously preserved to posterity. But Charlotte Brontë endowed him with his conversation.” What Olcott said—aloud—was something fatuous and commonplace touching on the state of the weather.
“I have yet other motives in presenting myself to-day, in this, your sanctum,” stated Mr. Van Nicht. “First of all, I wish to congratulate you upon what to me appears to be a very gratifying stroke of journalistic enterprise which has come to light in the columns of your valued organ since your advent into the community and for which, therefore, I assume you are responsible.”
“Well,” said Olcott, “we try to get out a reasonably live sheet.”
“Pardon me,” said Mr. Van Nicht, “but I do not refer to the aspect of your news columns. I am speaking with reference to a feature lately appearing in your Sunday edition, in what I believe is known as your magazine section. I have observed that, beginning two weeks ago, you inaugurated a department devoted to the genealogies of divers of our older and more distinguished American families. As I recall, the subjects of your first two articles were the Adams family, of Massachusetts, and the Lee family, of Virginia. It may interest you to know, sir—I trust indeed that it may please you to know—that I, personally, am most highly pleased that you should seek to inculcate in the minds of our people, through the medium of your columns, a knowledge of those strains of blood to which our nation is particularly indebted for much of its culture, much of its social development, many of its gentler and more graceful influences. It is a most worthy movement indeed, a most commendable undertaking. I repeat, sir, that I congratulate you upon it.”
“Thank you,” said Olcott. “This coming Sunday we are going to run a yarn about the Gordon family, of Georgia, and after that I believe come the Clays, of Kentucky.”
“Quite so, quite so,” said Mr. Van Nicht. “The names you have mentioned are names that are permanently embalmed in the written annals of our national life. But may I ask, sir, whether you have taken any steps as yet to in-corporate into your series an epitome of the achievements of the family of which I have the honour to be the head—the Van Nicht family?”
“Well, you see,” explained Olcott apologetically, “these articles are not written here in the office. They are sent to us in proof sheets as a part of our regular feature service, and we run 'em just as they come to us. Probably—probably”—he hesitated a moment over the job of phrasing tactfully his white lie—“probably a story on your family genealogy will be coming along pretty soon.”