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"Get your violin." A fresh difficulty arose: French Janin positively refused to play on his present instrument before a critical audience. "It's as thin as a cat," he protested. "Do you want me to make a show of myself?" "All right; I'll sing alone. Come on!" Janin's legs were uncertain; he stumbled over the path to the road and stopped at the fence.
Herbert Hoover was not only moving fast; he was learning fast, and he was rising fast in Janin's estimation. He had a regular salary or guarantee now with a certain percentage of all the fees collected by Janin's office from the properties he examined.
Janin's countenance resembled a walnut, brown and worn in innumerable furrows; his neck was like a dry inadequate stem. As he glanced at him the old man produced a familiar bottle and shook out what little powder, like finely ground glass, it contained. He greedily absorbed what there was and, petulantly exploring the empty container, flung it into the bushes.
Perhaps he had in mind the possible necessity of "getting up" a little special knowledge about Chinese mines and mining ways before he tackled his new job, just as he had got up enough physiology in thirty-six hours to help get him into Stanford University, and enough typewriting in a week-end to fit him for entrance into Louis Janin's office in San Francisco.
Women of the finest mind he neither comprehended nor cared to understand. They were outside his range. But what he missed in the whole representation of the fair sex he made up for by what he invented, as indeed, too, in his representation of the sterner sex; and Jules Janin's account of the matter is not far from the truth:
Madame Girardin's 'Ecole des Journalistes' deserved Jules Janin's reproof of it; and there is something noble and touching in that feeling of brotherhood among men of letters, which he invokes. I am so glad to hear you say that I am right, glad for your sake and glad for mine.
He had decided to get into association, some way, with the best mining engineer on the Coast. There was no question about who this was at that time. It was Louis Janin in San Francisco. So he appeared at Mr. Janin's office as a candidate for a job, any job so that it was a job under Louis Janin.
And he proceeded to explain why, first to Mr. Janin's indignant surprise but next to his great interest, because the explanation involved the elucidation of certain geologic facts not yet published to the world, which the typewriter boy had himself helped to discover during his work in the Grass Valley region.
The letters from the young mining engineer to the girl of the geology department, still at Stanford, came now in swift succession from Nevada, Wyoming, and Idaho, and then very soon after from Arizona and New Mexico. Little mines did not require much time for examination and reports signed "Hoover" came into Janin's office with bewildering rapidity.
Janin's animus blinded him to the rest, and it is just the rest of the qualities which converted the ephemeral success into the permanent. Taine's estimate is more discursive. He is further removed from polemics. He says: "Monsieur de Balzac has of private life a very deep and fine sentiment which goes even to minuteness of detail and of superstition.
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