half-crooked mind.

Schnitzel was smiling to himself with a smile of complete
self-satisfaction. In the light of his later conduct, I grew to
understand that smile. He had anticipated a rebuff, and he had been
received, as he read it, with consideration. The irony of my politeness
he had entirely missed. Instead, he read in what I said the admiration
of the amateur for the professional. He saw what he believed to be a
high agent of the Government treating him as a worthy antagonist. In no
other way can I explain his later heaping upon me his confidences. It
was the vanity of a child trying to show off.

In ten days, in the limited area of a two-thousand-ton steamer, one
could not help but learn something of the history of so communicative a
fellow-passenger as Schnitzel. His parents were German and still lived
in Germany. But he himself had been brought up on the East Side. An
uncle who kept a delicatessen shop in Avenue A had sent him to the
public schools and then to a "business college," where he had developed
remarkable expertness as a stenographer. He referred to his skill in
this difficult exercise with pitying contempt. Nevertheless, from a
room noisy with type-writers this skill had lifted him into the private
office of the president of the Nitrate Trust. There, as Schnitzel
expressed it, "I saw 'mine,' and I took it." To trace back the criminal
instinct that led Schnitzel to steal and sell the private letters of
his employer was not difficult. In all of his few early years I found it
lying latent. Of every story he told of himself, and he talked only of
himself, there was not one that was not to his discredit. He himself
never saw this, nor that all he told me showed he was without the moral
sense, and with an instinctive enjoyment of what was deceitful, mean,
and underhand. That, as I read it, was his character.