Spaulding lifted his brows ever so slightly. "Why?"
"Well, I gathered from the fact that you wired me to come home that you wanted my advice."
A second time Spaulding gestured with his eyebrows, for once fairly surprised out of his pose. "Your advice!..."
"Yes," said Duncan evenly: "as to whether you ought to give up your customers on my route or send them a man who could sell goods."
"Well...." Spaulding admitted.
"Oh, don't think I'm boasting of my acuteness: anybody could have guessed as much from the great number of heavy orders I have not been sending you."
"You've had bad luck...."
"You mean you have, Mr. Spaulding. It was good luck for me to be drawing down my weekly cheques, bad luck to you not to have a man who could earn them."
His desperate honesty touched Spaulding a trifle; at the risk of not seeming a business man to himself he inclined dubiously to relent, to give Duncan another chance. The fellow was likeable enough, his employer considered; he had good humour and even in dejection, distinction; whatever he was not, he was a man of birth and breeding. His face might be rusty with a day-old stubble, as it was; his shirt-cuffs frayed, his shoes down at the heel, his baggy clothing weirdly ready-made, as they were: there remained his air. You'd think he might amount to something, to somewhat more than a mere something, given half a chance in the right direction. Then what?... Spaulding sought from Duncan elucidation of this riddle.
"Duncan," he said, "what's the trouble?"