"You are Mr.----" The president looked at the stranger's card as though he had left it unread until he had finished far more important business. It really was unnecessary; but it had become a habit, which he lost only when speaking to his equals or his superiors in wealth.
"Grinnell," prompted the stranger, very calmly. He was so unimpressed by the president that the president was impressed by him.
"Ah, yes. Mr. Williams tells me you wish to become one of our depositors?"
"Yes, sir. I have here," taking a slip of paper from his pocket-book, "an Assay Office check on the Sub-Treasury. It is for a trifle over a hundred thousand dollars."
Even the greatest bank in Wall Street must have a kindly feeling toward depositors of a hundred thousand dollars. Mr. Dawson permitted himself to smile graciously.
"I am sure we shall be glad to have your account, Mr. Grinnell," he said. "You are in business in----" The slight arching of his eyebrows, rather than the inflection of his voice, made his words a delicate interrogation. He was a small, slender man, greyhaired and grey-moustached, with an air of polite aloofness from trivialities. His manners were what you might expect of a man whose grandfather had been Minister to France, and had never forgotten it; nor had his children. His self-possession was so great that it was not noticeable.
"I am not in any business, Mr. Dawson, unless," said the young man with a smile that deprived his voice of any semblance of pertness or of premeditated discourtesy, "it is the business of depositing $103,648.67 with the Metropolitan National Bank. My friend, Professor Willetts, of Columbia, gave me a letter of introduction. Here it is. I may say, Mr. Dawson, that I haven't the slightest intention of disturbing this account, as far as I know now, for an indefinite period." The president read the letter. It was from the professor of metallurgy at Columbia, who was an old acquaintance of Dawson's. It merely said that George K. Grinnell was one of his old students, a graduate of the School of Mines, who had asked him to suggest a safe bank of deposit. This the Metropolitan certainly was. He had asked his young friend to attach his own signature at the bottom, since Grinnell had no other bank accounts, and no other way of having his signature verified. Mr. Grinnell had said he wished his money to be absolutely safe, and Professor Willetts took great pleasure in sending him to Mr. Dawson.