Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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When the list arrived—its preparation took an hour of burrowing through old ledgers and check stubs—John Jackson studied it for a long time in silence.

“That woman’s got more money than you have,” grumbled Fowler at his elbow. “Every time she comes in she’s wearing a new hat. I bet she never hands out a cent herself—just goes around asking other people.”

John Jackson did not answer. He was thinking that Mrs. Ralston had been one of the first women in town to bar Ellery Jackson from her house. She did quite right, of course; and yet perhaps back there when Ellery was sixteen, if he had cared for some nice girl——

“Thomas J. MacDowell’s outside. Do you want to see him? I said I didn’t think you were in, because on second thoughts, Mr. Jackson, you look tired this morning——”

“I’ll see him,” interrupted John Jackson.

He watched Fowler’s retreating figure with an unfamiliar expression in his eyes. All that cordial diffuseness of Fowler’s—he wondered what it covered in the man’s heart. Several times, without Fowler’s knowledge, Jackson had seen him giving imitations of the boss for the benefit of the other employees; imitations with a touch of malice in them that John Jackson had smiled at then, but that now crept insinuatingly into his mind.