Xerxes Hartfield returned from India with a fortune of the size that ends conversation, and has offered Cairnholm no account of it since. Hartfield House holds his collections — cabinets of curiosities, a Turkish bath in the eastern manner, and Mabel, a cheetah he calls tame with more confidence than the household can always summon.
He is the most untroubled diner at any table: unhurried, amiable, and perfectly unforthcoming, a man to whom questions may be put but not, somehow, pressed. He sleeps badly and walks his own dark house at all hours, which the staff have learned to expect. Of his establishment, his habits, and his companion, the polite fiction of Cairnholm is that there is nothing to explain; Xerxes subscribes to this fiction generously, having endowed it.