The Returned Hero

Rather than the gratifying cortège 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 suède 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 boutonnière 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.