"Who is she?"
"Married to a Scotsman named Macintyre, I fancy."
"That tells me nothing," I said. "Who was she?"
"Daughter of a man named Roden."
"Not Herbert Roden?" I demanded.
"Yes. Art director at Jacksons, Limited."
"Well, well!" I exclaimed. "So Herbert Roden's got a daughter married.
Well, well! And it seems like a week ago that he and his uncle--you
know all about that affair, of course?"
"What affair?"
"Why, the Roden affair!"
"No," said my schoolmaster.
"You don't mean to say you've never--"
Nothing pleases a wandering native of the Five Towns more than to come
back and find that he knows things concerning the Five Towns which
another man who has lived there all his life doesn't know. In ten
seconds I was digging out for my schoolmaster one of those family
histories which lie embedded in the general grey soil of the past like
lumps of quartz veined and streaked with the precious metal of passion
and glittering here and there with the crystallizations of scandal.
"You could make a story out of that," he said, when I had done talking
and he had done laughing.
"It is a story," I replied.
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