Fictionary 4/23
Now I believe they will leave me alone. Obviously Rodman came up hoping to find evidence of my incompetence -- though how an incompetent could have got this place renovated, moved his library up, and got himself transported without arousing the suspicion of his watchful children, ought to be a hard one for Rodman to answer. I take some pride in the way I managed all that. And he went away this afternoon without a scrap of what he would call data.
This is the opening to one of my favorite books - though I can't say I would have been able to identify it with this quote. It's Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, a magnficent novel that tells two stories that are interwoven. This is from the more modern story, though in thinking about the book I almost always think first of the older portion of the book. Interesting, that.