Young People's Pride by Stephen Vincent Benet

And this time he was forced to pay internal high compliment to Mr. Piper / as well as to Mrs. Severance. The pitiful grey image, its knees rumpled / from the floor, its features streaked like a cheap paper mask with / ludicrous dreadful tears, had turned back into the President of the / Commercial Bank with branches in Bombay and Melbourne and all the / business-capitals of the world. Not that Mr. Piper was at ease again, / exactly -- to be at ease under the circumstances would merely have proved / him brightly inhuman -- but he looked as Oliver thought he might have / on one of the Street's Black Mondays when only complete firmness and / complete audacity in one could keep even the Commercial afloat at a time / when the Stock Exchange had turned into a floor-full of well-dressed / maniacs and houses that everyone had thought as solid as granite went to / pieces like sand castles.

Oliver set down the bottles and opened them with a feeling both that / he had never known Mr. Piper at all before, only Peter's father, and, / spookily, that neither Peter's father nor the terrible old man who / had wept on the floor beside Mrs. Severance could have any real / existence -- this was such a complete and unemotional Mr. Piper he had / before him, a Mr. Piper, too, in spite of all the oddities of the / present situation, so obviously at home in his own house.