Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/108

80 mouths, a vaguely sardonic grin, goose-footed, bald, wearing massive rings consistent with their short, stubby fingers and pontificial stomachs. Those who spent most of their time in their offices were the palest, others, travellers who were constantly moving about, retained the tan of the sea and the open air.

Despite their uniform clothing, they were distinguishable by certain habits: a young stock broker, embarrassed by his dangling arms, manipulated his dance card as he would his memorandum pad; a dealer in novelties searched his pockets for samples of sachet; the fingers of a manufacturer of worsteds were magnetically attracted to the upholstery of the chairs and portieres. Some of these wealthy people pushed their haughtiness and arrogance almost to the point of monomania. Old man Brullekens would never touch a piece of money, gold, silver, copper, unless as a preliminary it had been polished, scraped and cleaned in such a fashion that not the slightest bit of dirt adhered to it. A footman wore himself out every day polishing up his small change. By preference he desired 'freshly coined pieces, and collected bills newly come from the bank.

His neighbor, De Zater, never offered an ungloved hand to anyone, not even to his children, and if he were to inadventently pollute his aristocratic right hand by touching that of one of his acquaintances, he could not rest until he had washed it.

All were learned in the arcana of commerce, in the tricks and the legerdemain that made money pass from other people's hands into their own coffers, as if by virtue of the phenomenon of endosmose established by the physicists; all of them practised dupery and legal theft; all were experts in finesse, in composition