ittle resorts to spend
Sundays and holidays, generally taking with them a case of champagne and
several bags of golf sticks. He was fond of shooting, and belonged to a
duck club on the Cape, where poker and bridge were not tabooed. To his
intimates he was known as "Dit." Nor is it surprising that his attitude
toward women had become in general one of resentment; matrimony he
now regarded as unmitigated folly. At five and forty he was a vital,
dominating, dust-coloured man six feet and half an inch in height,
weighing a hundred and ninety pounds, and thus a trifle fleshy. When
relaxed, and in congenial company, he looked rather boyish, an aspect
characteristic of many American business men of to-day.

His head was large, he wore his hair short, his features also proclaimed
him as belonging to a modern American type in that they were not
clear-cut, but rather indefinable; a bristling, short-cropped moustache
gave him a certain efficient, military look which, when introduced to
strangers as "Colonel," was apt to deceive them into thinking him an
army officer. The title he had once received as a member of the staff
of the governor of the state, and was a tribute to a gregariousness
and political influence rather than to a genius for the art of war. Ex
officio, as the agent of the Chippering Mill and a man of substance to
boot, he was "in" politics, hail fellow well met with and an individual
to be taken into account by politicians from the governor and member of
congress down. He was efficient, of course; he had efficient hands and
shrewd, efficient eyes, and the military impression was deepened by his
manner of dealing with people, his conversation being yea, yea and nay,
nay,--save with his cronies and those of the other sex from whom he had
something to gain. His clothes always looked new, of pronounced patterns
and light colours set aside for him by an obsequious tailor in Boston.

If a human being in such an enviable position as that of agent of the
Chippering Mill can be regarded as property, it might be said that Mr.
Claude Ditmar belonged to the Chipperings of Boston, a family still
owning a controlling interest in the company. His loyalty to them and
to the mill he so ably conducted was the great loyalty of his life. For
Ditmar, a Chippering could do no wrong. It had been the keen eye of Mr.
Stephen Chippering that first had marked him, questioned him, recognized
his ability, and from the moment of that encounter h