"
It is not necessary to dilate upon the excellence of the dinner, to
repeat the dialogue, or to comment on the service, other than to say,
for the sake of record, that the first WAS excellent; the second
sprightly, and the third atrocious.
Loeb, the private secretary, came in for coffee. He was a tall, spare
man of thirty, pallidly handsome, with dark, studious eyes and
features of an unmistakably Hebraic cast, as his name might have
foretold. His teeth were marvellously white, and his slow smile
attractive. When he spoke, which was seldom unless a remark was
directed specifically to him, his voice was singularly deep and
resonant. More than once during the hour that Loeb spent with them
Barnes formed and dismissed a stubborn, ever-recurring opinion that
the man was not a Jew. Certainly he was not an American Jew. His
voice, his manner of speech, his every action stamped him as one born
and bred in a land far removed from Broadway and its counterparts. If
a Jew, he was of the East as it is measured from Rome: the Jew of the
carnal Orient.
And as the evening wore on, there came to Barnes the singular fancy
that this man was the master and not the servant of the house! He
could not put the ridiculous idea out of his mind.
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