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book. “She is a curiosity to me. She has the work ethic of a farm wife and the refinement of the well-bred.” He took a drink. “Only better, for it is not an acquired grace, but a natural refinement.”
    â€œRefinement?” Gibbs laughed. “Wasted on the likes of you.”
    David grinned. “No doubt.” He set down his tumbler. “Still, they use the pig to find truffle.”
    â€œA fitting analogy, I might say.”
    â€œYou might not,” David countered.
    Gibbs laughed. “Her apparel is common enough.”
    â€œMark me. She is a poor woman with nobility hidden beneath rags.”
    â€œAnd you a rich man with the common touch. How incongruous.”
    â€œHow perfect.”
    â€œHow so?”
    David leaned back in his chair. “Two oddities make a normality. It works in mathematics, as in life.”
    â€œYou are still just talking about a secretary?” Gibbs asked sardonically.
    David studied his associate’s expression with consternation.
    â€œI have said more than I ought and you have clearly heard more than I have said.” He lifted his glass to the light. “Is there much talk among the typists?”
    â€œSome. They like a scandal and if they cannot find one, they invent one.”
    â€œThen I suppose I am doing them a service of sorts.” He leaned back over his register. “Still, I wish she were not so formal.”
    Just then, the first of the mantel clocks struck the seventh hour, immediately followed by a chorus of bells, gongs, and chimes, all counting out the hour in a different voice. Gibbs, accustomed to thehourly pandemonium, waited for it to settle before continuing. “I think you are asking for trouble, David. Love and business do not mix well.”
    â€œGibbs, you surprise me. What do you know of love?”
    The man licked the rim of his glass, then set it down on the desk. “Only that it is the worm that conceals the hook.”
    â€œYou are cynical.”
    â€œAnd you are not?”
    David frowned. “I should be.”
    Gibbs nodded knowingly. He had grown up with David in the California mining town of Grass Valley and knew of what David spoke. David’s mother had abandoned him as a child and stolen from him as an adult.
    Rosalyn “Rose” King, a music hall singer of mediocre ability, had married David’s father, Jesse Parkin, believing he would someday strike the mother lode. Ten years later the two had managed toproduce only a son and a miserly shaft mine called the Eureka.
    The year David turned six, Rose abandoned the Midas dream and left everything, including David, behind. It wasn’t until the lonely and celebrationless Christmas day of that year that David accepted that his mother wasn’t coming back.
    Thirteen years to the month of her departure, the Eureka lived up to its name. It was to be one of the largest gold strikes in California history.
    Jesse ceded the mine to his son’s care, built a sixteen-hundred-acre ranch in Santa Rosa, and settled about the life of a Western Gentleman. Not two years later, Jesse was thrown from a horse and died instantly of a broken neck.
    Gibbs accompanied David as he buried his father in the foothills of Mount Saint Helena. David mourned greatly.
    The following spring, David received a letter from a mother he no longer knew.Rose had come West to Salt Lake City and learning of her husband’s fortune and recent demise, inquired into the will. Learning that David was the sole heir and not yet married, she invited him to come and live with her, with the urgent request that he send money ahead.
    Against Gibbs’s advice, David sold the mine. In a day when the average annual income was scarcely more than a thousand dollars, the Eureka fetched two million.
    David wired twenty-five thousand dollars to his mother and purchased, sight unseen, an elaborate Salt Lake City mansion for them to reside in.
    By the time he and Gibbs