Piccadilly Jim | Page 3

of the human
character infuriated him. Why should he be a totally different man on
Riverside Drive from the person he was in Pine Street? Why should he
be able to hold his own in Pine Street with grown men--whiskered,
square-jawed financiers--and yet be unable on Riverside Drive to eject
a fourteen-year-old boy from an easy chair? It seemed to him
sometimes that a curious paralysis of the will came over him out of
business hours.
Meanwhile, he had still to find a place where he could read his Sunday
paper.
He stood for a while in thought. Then his brow cleared, and he began to
mount the stairs. Reaching the top floor, he walked along the passage
and knocked on a door at the end of it. From behind this door, as from
behind those below, sounds proceeded, but this time they did not seem
to discourage Mr. Pett. It was the tapping of a typewriter that he heard,

and he listened to it with an air of benevolent approval. He loved to
hear the sound of a typewriter: it made home so like the office.
"Come in," called a girl's voice.
The room in which Mr. Pett found himself was small but cosy, and its
cosiness--oddly, considering the sex of its owner--had that peculiar
quality which belongs as a rule to the dens of men. A large bookcase
almost covered one side of it, its reds and blues and browns smiling
cheerfully at whoever entered. The walls were hung with prints,
judiciously chosen and arranged. Through a window to the left,
healthfully open at the bottom, the sun streamed in, bringing with it the
pleasantly subdued whirring of automobiles out on the Drive. At a desk
at right angles to this window, her vivid red-gold hair rippling in the
breeze from the river, sat the girl who had been working at the
typewriter. She turned as Mr. Pett entered, and smiled over her
shoulder.
Ann Chester, Mr. Pett's niece, looked her best when she smiled.
Although her hair was the most obviously striking feature of her
appearance, her mouth was really the most individual thing about her.
It was a mouth that suggested adventurous possibilities. In repose, it
had a look of having just finished saying something humorous, a kind
of demure appreciation of itself. When it smiled, a row of white teeth
flashed out: or, if the lips did not part, a dimple appeared on the right
cheek, giving the whole face an air of mischievous geniality. It was an
enterprising, swashbuckling sort of mouth, the mouth of one who
would lead forlorn hopes with a jest or plot whimsically lawless
conspiracies against convention. In its corners and in the firm line of
the chin beneath it there lurked, too, more than a hint of imperiousness.
A physiognomist would have gathered, correctly, that Ann Chester
liked having her own way and was accustomed to get it.
"Hello, uncle Peter," she said. "What's the trouble?"
"Am I interrupting you, Ann?"
"Not a bit. I'm only copying out a story for aunt Nesta. I promised her I

would. Would you like to hear some of it?"
Mr. Pett said he would not.
"You're missing a good thing," said Ann, turning the pages. "I'm all
worked up over it. It's called 'At Dead of Night,' and it's full of crime
and everything. You would never think aunt Nesta had such a feverish
imagination. There are detectives and kidnappers in it and all sorts of
luxuries. I suppose it's the effect of reading it, but you look to me as if
you were trailing something. You've got a sort of purposeful air."
Mr. Pett's amiable face writhed into what was intended to be a bitter
smile.
"I'm only trailing a quiet place to read in. I never saw such a place as
this house. It looks big enough outside for a regiment. Yet, when you're
inside, there's a poet or something in every room."
"What about the library? Isn't that sacred to you?"
"The boy Ogden's there."
"What a shame!"
"Wallowing in my best chair," said Mr. Pett morosely. "Smoking
cigarettes."
"Smoking? I thought he had promised aunt Nesta he wouldn't smoke."
"Well, he said he wasn't, of course, but I know he had been. I don't
know what to do with that boy. It's no good my talking to him. He--he
patronises me!" concluded Mr. Pett indignantly. "Sits there on his
shoulder blades with his feet on the table and talks to me with his
mouth full of candy as if I were his grandson."
"Little brute."
Ann was sorry for Mr. Pett. For many years now, ever since the death
of her mother, they had been inseparable. Her father, who was a

traveller, explorer, big-game hunter, and general sojourner in the
lonelier