CHAPTER 14It was the great Philander Doyle himself who opened the handsome white door of the old Candler house. He took my hand in one of his and laid the other over it, patting it once or twice as if I were some way in a particularly bad spot and needed comforting. I suppose it was sort of the bedside manner of a lawyer whose most lucrative practice had once been divorce and alimony and breach of promise and little women who thought they’d had a rotten deal and wanted to cash in on it. Or such, at least, was the reputation that still clung to Philander Doyle like the vaguely malodorous miasma that rises from a cellar that isn’t aired very frequently.
Of course, that might be really awfully unfair and prejudiced, I thought. Maybe it was just that Philander Doyle had from the beginning had
