Rich Man Poor Man

He was a little man round-shouldered elderly and spare with an air of alert bustling energy quite birdlike in its abruptness. Uppish you might have judged him and self-important too; yet in his tired eyes as well as in the droop of his small sensitive mouth there was something that belied the vanity of a pompous confident man. Nor was his briskness so very convincing once you had closely scanned him for beneath it all was a secret furtive nervousness that bordered at times on the panicky. He was in short shy—shy to a last degree; a self-conscious timorous man that on every occasion shrank mistrustfully from the busy world about him. A castaway marooned on a desert island could scarcely have been more solitary only in Mr. Mapleson's case of course the solitude was New York.