Page:Levenson - Butterfly Man.djvu/42

40 Strange to say, Pierre was an unkempt young man with ragged fingernails and a sloppy collar. He complained that he never had time to dress properly. His only diversion, he said, was an evening at La Lowell's.

Mr. Crofton, Mr. Lowell's secretary, was admitted to the circle as an equal. Of a good Kansas family, rich in wheat, Mr. Crofton had sprouted into Mr. Lowell's life one day in Paris, a day when Mr. Lowell quite mysteriously lost a highly paid secretary. Mr. Crofton's predecessor had married, causing Mr. Lowell to give him his congé, quite as peremptorily as he had just dismissed Mr. Pawne. Mr. Crofton had met Mr. Lowell in a gambling house, where he had tossed his last sou beneath a croupier's rake. He proposed to work out a loan from Mr. Lowell, acting as his secretary without pay until he could earn ninety thousand francs in credits.

That was ten years before, in 1912; and Mr. Crofton, who had studied at Chicago, Columbia and the Sorbonne and who could speak eleven languages, was still Mr. Lowell's secretary.

Mr. Crofton was a little larger than Mr. Pawne, his erstwhile assistant. He averred that his parents were in the Social Register, although no one took the trouble to investigate the truth of this assertion. He knew everyone, everywhere and frequently talked about the time he had danced with Queen Victoria of Spain during a passage of the Mediterranean. He was invaluable to Mr. Lowell, who, being a Texan, was frequently at a disadvantage in certain of the higher social circles.

Gregory Gregg, the poet, completed the number of those present. He was very tall, dark, with curly black hair which rambled about a brachycephalic head exactly as a