"Yes, you're a good boy. I want to give you something."
Evan was surprised. "A dime, or even a quarter!" he thought, smiling to himself. Nevertheless he went willingly enough, filled with a great curiosity.
The house was a showy affair of grey sandstone built in the style of a French château. But Evan's trained eye perceived many lapses of taste; it was not even well-built; the window-casings were of wood when they should have been of stone; the side of the house, plainly visible from the street, was of common yellow brick. It looked like a jerry-built palace for a parvenu. Evan wondered how the old money-lender had come to be stuck with it.
"My son's house," said Deaves with a queer mixture of pride and scorn. "I live with them. Sinful waste!"
He avoided the front door with its grand grill of polished steel. The street widening had shorn off the original areaway of the house, and the service entrance was now a mere slit in the sidewalk with a steep stair swallowed up in blackness below. Down this stair old Simeon Deaves made his way. Evan followed, grinning to himself. It was certainly an odd way for a man to enter his own home.
"We won't meet Maud this way," Deaves said over his shoulder.
The remark called up a picture of Maud before Evan's mind's eye.
In the basement of the great house they met many servants passing to and fro, before whom the old man cringed a little. These superior menials turned an indifferent shoulder to him, but stared hard at Evan. Evan flushed. Insolence in servants galled his pride. "If I paid their wages I'd teach them better manners!" he thought.
Somewhere in the bowels of the house, which was full of passages like all ill-planned dwellings, the old man unlocked a door and led Even into a vaultlike chamber without a window. Carefully closing the door behind them he turned on a light.
"This is where I keep all my things," he said innocently. "Maud never comes down here."
Evan looked around. A strange collection of objects met his view; old clothes, old newspapers, old hardware, in extraordinary disorder. It was like the junk room in an old farmhouse. The walls were covered with shelves heaped with objects; old clocks, broken china ornaments, empty cans, pieces of rope, bundles of rags. On the floor besides, were boxes and trunks, some with covers, some without; the latter overflowing with rubbish. Evan wondered whimsically if the closed boxes were filled with shining gold eagles. It would be quite in keeping, he thought. But on second thoughts, no. Your modern miser is too sensible of the advantages of safe deposit vaults.