comfort of any kind. He asked his visitor to sit down, and to excuse him for a moment while he copied some entries into a notebook.
St. Peter watched him scribbling with his fountain pen. The hands that were so deft in delicate manipulations were white and soft-looking; the fingers long and loosely hung, stained with chemicals, and blunted at the tips like a violinist’s. His head was square, and the lower part of his face was covered by a reddish, matted beard. His pale eyes and fawn-coloured eyebrows were outbalanced by his mouth, his most conspicuous feature. One always remembered about Crane that unexpected, startling red mouth in a setting of kinky beard. The lips had no modelling, they were as thick at the corners as in the middle, and he spoke through them rather than with them. He seemed painfully conscious of them.
St. Peter saw no use in beating about the bush. As soon as Crane put down his pen, he remarked that Mrs. Crane had been to see him that afternoon. His colleague flushed, took up a large celluloid paper-knife, and began shutting and unshutting his hands about the blade.
“I want to know exactly how you feel about this, and what the facts are,” St. Peter began. “We’ve never discussed it before, and there may be things I know nothing about. Did Tom ever say that he meant you to have a share in his profits, if there were any?”
“No, not exactly. Not exactly that.” Dr. Crane moved his shoulders about in his tight coat and looked embarrassed and unhappy. “More than once he said, in a general way, that he hoped it would go, on my account as well as on his own, and that we would use the income for further experiments.”
“Did he talk much about the possible commercial value of the gas while he was trying to make it?”
“Not much. No, very seldom. Perhaps not more than half a dozen times in the three years he was working in my laboratory. But whenever he did,