Piper as
well as to Mrs. Severance. The pitiful grey image, its knees rumpled from
the floor, its features streaked like a cheap paper mask with ludicrous
dreadful tears, had turned back into the President of the Commercial Bank
with branches in Bombay and Melbourne and all the business-capitals of the
world. Not that Mr. Piper was at ease again, exactly--to be at ease under
the circumstances would merely have proved him brightly inhuman--but he
looked as Oliver thought he might have on one of the Street's Black Mondays
when only complete firmness and complete audacity in one could keep even
the Commercial afloat at a time when the Stock Exchange had turned into a
floor-full of well-dressed maniacs and houses that everyone had thought as
solid as granite went to pieces like sand castles.
Oliver set down the bottles and opened them with a feeling both that he had
never known Mr. Piper at all before, only Peter's father, and, spookily,
that neither Peter's father nor the terrible old man who had wept on the
floor beside Mrs. Severance could have any real existence--this was such a
complete and unemotional Mr.
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