I desire to
unravel my own web, so to speak--to spin off my own silk--to examine and
analyze what I have accumulated. There are rooms here--containing
_masterpieces_--unique treasures--that have never been opened for
years--whose contents I have myself forgotten. That's why people call me
a madman. Why? What did I want with a big establishment eating up my
income?--with a lot of prying idiots from outside--museum bores,
bothering me for loans--common tourists, offering impertinent tips to my
housekeeper, or picking and stealing, perhaps, when her back was turned!
I bought the things, and _shut them up_. They were safe, anyway. But now
that process has gone on for a quarter of a century. You come along. A
chance--a freak--a caprice, if you like, makes me arrange these rooms for
you. That gives me new ideas--"
He turned and looked with sharp, slow scrutiny round the walls:
"The fact is I have been so far engaged in hoarding--heaping together.
The things in this house--my extraordinary collections--have been the
nuts--and I, the squirrel. But now the nuts are bursting out of the hole,
and the squirrel wants to see what he's got. That brings me to my point!"
He turned emphatically toward Faversham, leaning hard on a marqueterie
table that stood between them:
"I offer you, sir, the post, the double post, of agent to my property,
and of private secretary, or assistant to myself. I offer you a salary of
three thousand a year--three thousand pounds, a year--if you will
undertake the management of my estates, and be my lieutenant in the
arrangement of my collections.
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