orresponding with makers of camping goods.

Because he was not office-broken he did not worry about the risks of
the new enterprise. The stupid details of affairs had, for him, a
soul--the Adventure of Business.

To be consulted by draftsmen and shop foremen; to feel that if he
should not arrive at 8.30 A.M. to the second the most important part
of all the world's business would be halted and stenographers loll in
expensive idleness; to have the chief, old VanZile, politely anxious
as to how things were going; to plan ways of making a million dollars
and not have the plans seem fantastic--all these made it interesting
to overwork, and hypnotized Carl into a feeling of responsibility
which was less spectacular than flying before thousands, but more in
accordance with the spirit of the time and place.

Inside the office--busy and reaching for success. Outside the
office--frankly bored.

Carl was a dethroned prince. He had been accustomed to a more than
royal court of admirers. Now he was a nobody the moment he went twenty
feet from his desk. He was forgotten. He did not seek out the many
people he had met when he was an aviator and a somebody. He believed,
perhaps foolishly, that they liked him only as a personage, not as a
person. He sat lonely at dinner, in cheap restaurants with stains on
the table-cloths, for he had put much of his capital into the new
Touricar Company, mothered by the VanZile Corporation; and aeroplanes,
accessories, traveling-expenses, and the like had devoured much of his
large earnings at aviation before he had left the game.

In his large, shabby, fairly expensive furnished room on Seventy-fifth
Street he spent unwilling evenings, working on Touricar plans, or
reading French--French technical motor literature, light novels,
Balzac, anything.

He tried to keep in physical form, and, much though the routine and
silly gestures of gymnasium exercises bored him, he took them three
times a week. He could not explain the reason, but he kept his
identity concealed at the gymnasium, giving his name as "O. Ericson."

Even at the Aero Club, where scores knew him by sight, he was a
nobody. Aviation, like all pioneer arts, must look to the men who are
doing new things or planning new things, not to heroes past. Carl was
often alone at lunch at the club. Any group would have welcomed him,
but he did not seek them out. For the first time he really saw the
interior decorations of the club. In the old day