Chapter X
Mr. Boldero liked the idea of the Patent Small-Clothes. He liked it immensely, he said, immensely.
“There’s money in it,” he said.
Mr. Boldero was a small dark man of about forty-five, active as a bird and with a bird’s brown, beady eyes, a bird’s sharp nose. He was always busy, always had twenty different irons in the fire at once, was always fresh, clearheaded, never tired. He was also always unpunctual, always untidy. He had no sense of time or of order. But he got away with it, as he liked to say. He delivered the goods—or rather the goods, in the convenient form of cash, delivered themselves, almost miraculously it always seemed, to him.
He was like a bird in appearance. But in mind, Gumbril found, after having seen him once or twice, he was like a caterpillar: he ate al
