han the gratifying cortege which he pictured in his dreams, a
hansom cab or a motorcycle could quite easily have conveyed all the
sorrowing employees of the Bartlesville Tool Works who voluntarily would
have followed its president to his grave.

But when Sprudell closed his office door, he locked this adamantine,
quibbling, frankly penurious, tyrannical man of business inside, and the
chameleon does not change its color with greater ease than Sprudell took
on another and distinct personality. On the instant he became the "good
fellow," his pink face and beaming eyes radiating affability,
conviviality, an all-embracing fondness for mankind, also a susceptible
Don Juan keenly on the alert for adventure of a sentimental nature.

In appearance, too, he was a credit to the Bartlesville Commercial Club,
when, with his pink face glowing above a glimpse of crimson neck scarf,
dressed in pearl-gray spats, gray topcoat, gray business clothes
indistinctly barred with black, and suede gloves of London smoke, he
bounded up the clubhouse steps with the elasticity of well-preserved
fifty, lightly swinging a slender stick. His jauntily-placed hat was a
trifle, a mere suspicion, too small, and always he wore a dewy
boutonniere of violets, while his thick, gray hair had a slight part
behind which it pleased him to think gave the touch of distinction and
originality he coveted.

This was the lighter side of T. Victor Sprudell. The side of himself
which he took most seriously was his intellectual side. When he was the
scholar, the scientist, the philosopher, he demanded and received the
strictest attention and consideration from his immediate coterie of
friends. So long as he was merely _le bon diable_, the jovial clubman,
it was safe to banter and even to contradict him; but when the
conversation drifted into the higher realms of thought, it was tacitly
understood that the privileges of friendship were revoked. At such
moments it was as though the oracle of Delphi spoke.

This ambition to shine as a man of learning was the natural outcome of
his disproportionate vanity, his abnormal egotism, his craving for
prominence and power. Sprudell was a man who had had meager youthful
advantages, but through life he had observed the tremendous impression
which scholarly attainments made upon the superficially educated--which
they made upon him.

So he set about acquiring knowledge.

He dabbled in the languages, and a few useful words and phra