“Mr. Harden will see you now, Mrs. Tyler.”
Harden’s secretary held the door open, and Melissa Tyler went into a room which seemed less to her like an office than the lounge in a small and exclusive club. A sexless one. Harden, over at the desk, gave up examining an antiquated coffee mill and a woman’s elbow-length scarlet glove. He stood and came to meet her. He was a compact man, philosophically accepting a retreating hairline, and with a face that had been trained as a sympathetic mirror for anything from the simple to the exorbitant, and certainly for the grotesque.
“Good morning, Mrs. Tyler. Rotten day. Do you ever get it like this down in Parnellton?”
Melissa looked at rain sheeting eastward across New York and running drearily down windowpanes.
“As I remember it, we do, Mr. Harde
