“Who is he, anyhow?” demanded Peck.
“That’s just my query,” said Ferris.
“Nobody in the house knows anything definite about him,” remarked R. Hobbs Lucas. “And yet he evidently is a distinguished person, and his name haunts me.”
“So it does me,” said Miss Moyne.
“I tell you he’s a newspaper reporter. His cheek proves that,” remarked Peck.
Miss Crabb made a note, her own cheek flaming. “I presume you call that humor,” she observed, “it’s about like New York’s best efforts. In the West reporters are respectable people.”
“I beg pardon,” Peck said hastily, “I did not mean to insinuate that anybody is not respectable. Everybody is eminently respectable if I speak of them. I never trouble myself with the other kind.”
“Well, I don’t believe that Mr. Dufour is a reporter at all,” replied Miss Crabb, with emphasis, “for he’s not inquisitive, he don’t make notes, and he don’t appear to be writing any.”
“In my opinion he’s a realist—a genuine analytical, motive-dissecting, commonplace-recording, international novelist in disguise,” said Ferris.