"Well, what did he say?" Lucas, Senior, challenged again and read through the tomfoolery only to dismiss it once more with contempt. "Imagine Oliver's wife wanting to relieve my mind! Spooks!"
But his omnivorous reading of these last few years had presented to his attention many paragraphs and occasional serious essays and articles having to do with "spooks"; these had angered him so greatly that he had read through several of them and emerged with only greater disdain for the subject than before. However, the subject of "spooks" had never taken a practical bearing before; now it had; and Lucas's mind, for more than seventy years, had been shrewd and pragmatic; so between his scoldings, he began turning over this offensive subject and soon considered something after this fashion:
"Here you are, an old fool not far from fourscore years; you've been waiting for quite a while for something to happen. It happened last September, and for four months you've been trying to prove it. Along comes the first confirmation of it, and you call it tomfoolery."
So Lucas forsook his son's shelf about the middle of the afternoon of that day and startled the chauffeur of Myra's town car, lent for the afternoon, by ordering him to go at once to the public library. There, after some querulous inquiry, Lucas Cullen, Senior, for the first time in his life, found himself in a reference room.
As a consequence, he had another talk with his son that evening when the two were alone in the smoking room overlooking the lake.
"I'm going to see Jaccard to-morrow, Luke," so Lucas suddenly announced.
