The Club of Queer Trades
carelessness in being really urgent and coercive—a telegram. This he opened with the same heavy distraction with which he broke his egg and drank his tea. When he read it he did not stir a hair or say a word, but something, I know not what, made me feel that the motionless figure had been pulled together suddenly as strings are tightened on a slack guitar. Though he said nothing and did not move, I knew that he had been for an instant cleared and sharpened with a shock of cold water. It was scarcely any surprise to me when a man had drifted sullenly to his seat and fallen into it, kicked it away like a cur from under him and came round to me in two strides.
"What do you make of that?" he said, and flattened out the wire in front of me.
It ran: "Please come at once. James's mental state dangerous. Chadd."
"What does the woman mean?" I said, after a pause, irritably. "Those women have been saying that the poor old professor was mad ever since he was born."
"You are mistaken," said Grant, com-
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