Begin­ning of Chap­ter 8:

In Tal­madge Marquis’s inner office on the seventy-eighth floor of the Empire State Build­ing were fathered four mas­ters of men: Mar­quis him­self, Vil­helm Van Wirt (whom the atten­tive reader will remem­ber as Andrew’s men­tor, the sales man­ager of the Repub­lic Broad­cast­ing Com­pany), and two gen­tle­men named Wal­ter B. Grovill and Thomas Leach, whose joined patronyms formed the name of an adver­tis­ing firm known wher­ever any­body ate the bread of broad­cast­ing. As to these two new fig­ures on our stage, we are deter­mined to leave descrip­tion and pro­ceed with our tale. You must be con­tent, then, to know that Grovill was large, fat, and pale, and ended most of his utter­ances with a con­cil­ia­tory gig­gle, while Leach was small, bitter-visaged, and pale, and inces­santly twisted a col­lege ring around his third fin­ger by flick­ing it with his thumb. Some day, if spared, we may tell the story of these two although it will not be so whole­some and improv­ing a tale as this one, con­tain­ing, as it must, con­sid­er­ably more human error and fewer inter­ludes of inno­cent romance.

p. 91

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Tags: Aurora Dawn, Character Descriptions, Herman Wouk, Humor, Introductions, satire, Story Telling, Story Telling Devices