"Come along, please. It's our turn now."
He identified Mary with his own interests, as if they were intimately
hers. Politely, or perhaps in cowardice, he stood aside to let her go
before him. Immediately and without noise the door was closed behind
them.
Mary's hands were cold. A little pulse was beating in her throat, and
its throbbing made her feel slightly sick. She looked up, wide-eyed,
into the face of a man who had dismissed the veiled woman, and stood
waiting to receive them.
He was spare, elderly, black-coated, almost absurdly respectable
looking, with his gray beard and mild gaze behind gold-rimmed pince-nez.
The small bare room with its plain desk and two or three chairs made a
bleak background for the neat figure of the man. The austerity of the
closet-like enclosure, in contrast with the magnificence outside, seemed
meant as a warning to let petitions be brief, to the point, and above
all strictly within the bounds of reason.
"What do you wish me to do for you?" As he asked this question, with
cool civility, the benevolent yet cautious eyes peered through their
glass screen at Mary; and the thought sprang into her mind that this
elderly man of commonplace appearance had perhaps listened to more
harrowing stories of human misery and ruin than any other person in the
world. Even the most popular father confessor of the church could
scarcely have heard as many agonizing appeals. He must be able to
discriminate between truth and falsehood, to read faces and judge
voices, for no doubt, as Mary guessed, people must often come to him
swearing they had lost many thousands of francs, when in reality their
losses amounted only to a few hundreds.
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