one of the cars which had just plunged down abruptly, banged open its door, belched out two or three people and swallowed a dozen more, he was finally deposited with the same abruptness on the seventh floor, where he stepped out into a wide dark corridor, squinted and grimaced uncertainly to right and left as he had done for twenty-five years, and then went left along the corridor, past rows of lighted offices in which one could hear the preliminary clicking of typewriters, the rattling of crisp papers, and the sounds of people beginning their day’s work. At the end of the corridor Bascom Pentland turned right along another corridor and at length paused before a door which bore this inscription across the familiar glazed glass of American business offices: “The John T. Brill Realty Co.—Houses For Rent or Sale.” Below this bold legend in much smaller letters was printed: “Bascom Pentland—Att’y at Law—Conveyancer and Title Expert.”
The appearance of this strange figure in State Street, or anywhere else, had always been sufficient to attract attention and to draw comment. Bascom Pentland, if he had straightened to his full height, would have been six feet and three or four inches tall, but he had always walked with a stoop and as he grew older the stoop had become confirmed: he presented a tall, gnarled, bony figure, cadaverous and stringy, but tough as hickory. He was of that race of men who seem never to wear out, or to grow old, or to die: they live with almost undiminished vitality to great ages, and when they die they die suddenly. There is no slow wastage and decay because there is so little to waste or decay: their mummied and stringy flesh has the durability of granite.
Bascom Pentland clothed his angular figure with an assortment of odd garments which seemed to have the same durability: they were immensely old and worn, but they also gave no signs of ever wearing out, for by their cut and general appearance of age, it seemed that his frugal soul had selected in the’nineties materials which it hoped would last for ever. His coat, which was originally of a dark dull pepper-and-salt grey, had gone green at the seams and pockets, and moreover it was a ridiculously short skimpy coat for a gaunt big-boned man like this: it was hardly more than a jacket, his great wristy hands burst out of it like lengths of cordwood, and the mark of his high-humped narrow shoulders cut into it with a knife-like sharpness. His trousers were also tight and skimpy, of a lighter grey and of a rough woolly texture from which all fuzz and fluff had long ago been rubbed; he wore rough country brogans with raw-hide laces, and a funny little flat hat of ancient black felt, which
