‘Still, maybe I am hard on Sara. She don’t know yet what she wants to do — sits around waiting for Santa Claus — can’t decide will she get married or be a missionary or raise wire-haired terriers. Poor kid, she’s kind of lost, don’t you think so?’

‘Of course, dear.’

Hazel was wide asleep. But so wrathful was he that, though he had principles about ‘getting your beauty sleep’, he opened his current detective story and found happiness again: the delights of Chinese daggers, robbers’ castles on the Yorkshire moors, baronets bleeding in rooms with locked doors and no windows.

He sighed happily as he came to the end of the tale:

‘” . . . that whatever you say will be taken down in writing and may be used against you”, said Superintendent McCleaver.

‘The professor coughed and raised a delicate hand to his pallid lips.

‘“Seize him, men!” shouted the superintendent, lumbering out of the unwieldy Tudor chair. Sergeant McBeaver sprang at the professor, then stood appalled as that slim febrile body, all steel and rubber, slumped in the chair, and his head fell sidewise.

‘P.C. McDeaver growled, “He must ‘ve had potassium cyanide (KCN) concealed in his hand.”

‘The superintendent and Dr. Rosecliff exchanged slight smiles, and the Doctor murmured, “Oh no, that wouldn’t be, would it? Or would it?”’

Fred Cornplow joined them in the slight smiles. This was fine. He was glad that they had captured the professor; a really dangerous, anti-social gent, given to murdering with fishhooks the spinster aunts of rural deans; but the poor maniac had been helpful to the soya-bean farmers of West Wiltshire. Fred looked tenderly at Hazel and turned off the light, and not till 8 a.m. did he think again of the slings and arrows of outrageous Sara, the sea of troubles that was certain to lave the golden feet of Howard.

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The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 4

Frederick William Cornplow was in his office, at the Triumph agency, and he was busy. He had perceived that it was time to add an agency for trailers to his business, and he had sent his foreman and assistant manager, Paul Popple, out to Chicago to look into the matter of the Duplex Trailer, a new make, only just now in production but promising well.

That left Fred shorthanded. He had no one to sell cars except salesmen, and they had one fault: they could not endure just selling a car; they had to go through their little pieces about the Triumph which, with such agony, they had learned from Fred, and if a customer should attempt to buy a car off the floor, without letting the salesman lift the bonnet and point out that those funny jiggers there were the spark plugs, the salesman would go to pieces.

Fred had finished the morning mail. He had dictated to his secretary his decisions that he wouldn’t really care to donate a free car to the Navaho, New Hampshire, Orphanage; nor serve as a committeeman for the Chamber of Commerce annual banquet in honour of Commodore Perry; nor contribute a hundred dollars to the Truxon College badminton association. Pleased that this morning he had been satisfactorily hardhearted, Fred lighted his first cigar of the day (the cigarettes began just after the cornflakes), and clucked, as into the office was ushered his sub-agent, Bert Whizzle, Triumph representative at Enigmaville.