"It _does_ give me a little elbow-room, though."
This is the silent acknowledgment that Walworth sometimes makes to himself--but grudgingly.
Walworth Floyd is a sleek, well-fed, prosperous-looking fellow of thirty. His figure is a trifle too short and dumpy to be pronounced absolutely good; but it is always strikingly well-dressed--for he has lived in the West hardly a year as yet. His face is not handsome, but it is gentlemanly quite. One might, indeed, complain of the retreating lines of his forehead, and regret, too, that his chin, once perfect, now shows leanings towards the duplex; but, on the other hand, his well-bridged nose, you are sure, has been figuring in family portraits for the last hundred years, and his plump hands, by reason of the fine texture of the skin and the shapeliness of the nails, form a point that is distinctly aristocratic. Yet penmanship, under his manipulations, becomes a very crabbed and laborious affair, and this light species of manual labor is usually performed, so far as he is concerned, by other hands. He has a sort of general clerk, and he shares the services of a stenographer with two or three of his neighbors. He employs, too, an office-boy, who would idle away a good deal of time if Walworth were not in the habit of sending frequent communications to the steward of his club. Walworth, garmented in his plump placidity, has been accustomed to fare sumptuously every day, and to worry his head about as few things as possible. His dining he does for himself; his thinking he has somebody else do for him: His book-keeping and auditing and so on are done in the East, and a friend of his--he has no enemies--once said that his stomach was in Chicago, while his brains were in Boston.
Walworth, considering his family training and traditions, is inexplicably expansive. Even more than his limited capabilities for business, even more than the exactions of a wife whose pinched girlhood has helped her to a full appreciation of her present membership in a wealthy family, has his own open-hearted bonhomie "kept him back." He is just the man to whom one writes a letter of introduction without any sense of imposing a burden, or to whom one may present it without experiencing any great sense of embarrassment. And it is a letter of introduction, in point of fact, which is now lying half folded on the extended elbow-rest of his desk, and has been lying there for a quarter of an hour.