at me. "You certainly haven't got a tummy," he remarked with admiring envy. "I wish I were as thin!" And the casual words made a queer impression on me. I realized abruptly how little of certain real values such people knew ... how little these protected people ever could know. I still see his admiring, good-humoured, kindly expression, as he said the empty words....
James Speyer, brother of Edgar, who later became a baronet and member of the Privy Council, was what we called in New York a "white man." I hardly think I proved an ideal private secretary. His patience and kindness began at the first trial interview I had with him, when my shorthand--he dictated a newspaper financial paragraph full of unfamiliar terms--was not at its best, "not very grand," were the actual words he used. As for bookkeeping, I told him frankly that "figures were my idea of hell," whereupon, after a moment's puzzled stare, he laughed and said that keeping accounts need not be among my principal duties. A clerk from the office could come up and balance the books every month. The phrase about hell, the grave expression of my face, he told me long afterwards, touched his sense of humour. The huge book in which I kept his personal accounts proved, none the less, a daily nightmare, with its nine columns for different kinds of expenditure--Charities, Housekeeping, Presents, Loans, Personal, and the rest. It locked with a key. I spent hours over it. No total ever came out twice alike. Yet Mr. Hopf, the bright-eyed, diminutive German from the office, ran his tiny fingers up and down those columns like some twinkling insect, chatting with me while he added, and making the totals right in a few minutes. Max Hopf, with his slight, twisty body, looked like an agile figure of 3 himself. In his spare time, I felt sure, he played with figures. He was a juggler in my eyes.
The first week in my new job was a nervous one, though Mr. Speyer's tact and kindly feeling soon put me at my ease. My desk at first was in a corner of an unused
board room in the bank, where I sat like a king answering
