“Gosh sakes! Don’t you know who Aleck Blair is?”
“Blair? Blair?” said Kent innocently. “Is he the author of Blair’s Studies of Neuropterae?”
Elder Dennett snorted. “He’s a millionaire, that’s what he is! Ain’t you read about him in the Fabric Trust investigations?”
“Oh, that Blair! Yes, I believe I have.”
Kent yawned. It was a well-conceived bit of strategy, and met with deserved success. Regarding that yawn as a challenge to his vocational powers, the Elder set about eliminating the inhuman indifference of which it was the expression. Floods of information poured from his eager mouth. He traced the history of the Blairs in and out of concentric circles of scandal; financial, political, social—and mostly untrue. Those in which the greatest proportion of truth inhered dealt with the escapades of Wilfrid Blair, the only son and heir of the household, who had burned up all the paternal money he could lay hands on, writing his name in red fire across the night life of London, Paris, and New York. Tiring of this, he had come home and married a girl of nineteen, beautiful and innocent, whose parents, the Elder piously opined, had sold her to the devil, per Mr. Blair, agent. The girl, whose maiden name was Marjorie Dorrance—Kent’s fingers went to his ear at this—had left Blair after a year of marriage, though there was no legal process, and he had returned to his haunts of the gutter, until retribution overtook him, in the form of tuberculosis. His father had brought him to their place on Sundayman’s Creek, and there he was kept in semi-seclusion, visited from time to time by his young wife, who helped to care for him.
“That’s the story they tell,” commented the Elder; “but some folks has got suspicions.”
“It’s a prevalent complaint,” murmured Kent, “and highly contagious.”
Dennett stared. “My own suspicions,” he proceeded firmly, “is that the young feller hasn’t got no more consumption than you have. I think old Blair has got him here to keep him out of the papers.”
“Publicity is not to Mr. Blair’s taste, then?”
“‘Not’s’ no word for it,” declared the human Bureau of Information, delighted at this evidence of dawning interest on the part of his hearer. “He’s crazy against it. They says he pays Town Titbits a thousand dollars a year to let young Blair’s name alone. I don’t believe the old man would hardly stop short of murder to keep his name out of print. He’s kind o’ loony on the subject.”