Then, after some brief mention of certain business details, Merriman said to him, gruffly, and as though grudgingly:
"I own I am more satisfied now I have met you, Mr. Savage. I did not much care about your appointment as executor. But I might have trusted Mr. Smyrthwaite's judgment. I have seldom known him wrong in his estimate of a man."
"You wish me to understand that you believe me to be quite fairly honest and competent?" Adrian returned, in mingled annoyance and pleasure. The intention was complimentary, but the address so singularly blunt! "I venture to agree with you, my dear sir. Without vanity, I have reason to believe I really am both."
"So much the better," Merriman answered, sardonically. "I have no wish to offend you. But an uncommon amount of property, in which I am interested, is changing hands; and honest, trustworthy persons are pretty scarce." He glanced from under penthouse eyebrows across the room to where Challoner, shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, dancing-bear fashion, stood talking to Colonel Haig. "At least in my experience they are, Mr. Savage. When a family is dying out you generally find the males are debilitated specimens and the females the strongest. In this family, if Miss Smyrthwaite had been born a boy it would have been better for the name and for the business. Only, then, you and I shouldn't have met here to-day, because Mr. Smyrthwaite would never have left Highdene, and I should never have been manager at the mills."
"Which would have been a misfortune—for me, in any case," Adrian returned, suavely.
"Maybe," the other said. "But I can tell you Joanna Smyrthwaite's all right. She has sound commercial instincts if she's allowed to use them. It is an all-fired pity she's a woman."
An idea occurred to Adrian.
"She should have married," he said. This bluntness of statement became lamentably infectious! "Every woman should marry. Then her abilities find their natural expression and development."
"Quite right, sir. And it is on the cards, I am thinking, Joanna would have married if a man had not been too much afraid of her father to ask her. Mind," he added, "I have no quarrel with our late head. My father was a national schoolmaster. My grandfather was a mill-hand. I should not be where I am but for Mr. Smyrthwaite. He fancied my looks when I was quite a little nipper, picked me out and gave me my start. And I'm not boasting, any more than you were just now, if I say I know he never had reason to regret doing that."
The speaker straightened up his heavy figure, looking Adrian steadily in the eyes.