There was little that concerned him with which she did not become acquainted. She knew that his house on Tenth Street was heavily mortgaged and that on the second loan carried by the property he was paying an outrageous rate of interest; that on the tenth of every month he never failed to send a check for sixty-six dollars and sixty-seven cents to a man in Memphis, Tennessee, that his dentist threatened to sue him unless he settled a bill that had been owing for two years; that on the first of every month, Mr. Olmstead deposited to his account in the Chemical National Bank five hundred dollars; that no month ever passed without his chief sending for the old man and directing him to deposit an additional hundred, or two hundred, or sometimes three hundred to his account, and that these sums appeared on the books of the company as personal indebtedness. Frequently this levy upon the Company’s bank balance upset Mr. Olmstead, and more than once Jeannette heard the old cashier emphatically assert as he rapped his eye-glasses in his agitated fashion upon his thumb-nail:
“All right, Mr. Corey,--you’re the boss here, and I’ve got to do as you say, but I won’t answer for it, Mr. Corey. I warn you, sir, we won’t have enough for next week’s pay-roll!”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” Mr. Corey would soothe him. “We’ll manage somehow; you pay the money in the bank for me and we’ll talk about it afterwards.”
There were even more intimate things about the man she served which became his secretary’s knowledge. He sometimes took the sixtieth of a grain of strychnine when he was unusually tired, he dyed his mustache and eyebrows, and wore hygienic underwear for which he paid six dollars a garment. She had charge of his personal bank account. She drew the checks, put them before him for his signature, and sent them out in the mail. While Mrs. Corey was in Kennebunkport, she paid all the household expenses of the establishment on Tenth Street: electric light and milk bills, grocer’s and butcher’s accounts, the wages of the cook. She knew what were Mr. Corey’s dues and expenses at the Lotus Club, what he paid for his clothes, what he owed at Brooks Bros., and at the Everett House where he had a charge account and signed checks for his lunches. There were no secrets in his life that were closed to her; he had less than most men to conceal; she considered him the most generous, the most upright, the most admirable man in the world.