are dozens of lawyers in New
York whose voices I know well--yet whose faces I have never seen.

My office is on the nineteenth floor of a white marble building, and I
can look down the harbor to the south and up the Hudson to the north. I
sit there in my window like a cliffdweller at the mouth of his cave.
When I walk along Wall Street I can look up at many other hundreds of
these caves, each with its human occupant. We leave our houses uptown,
clamber down into a tunnel called the Subway, are shot five miles or so
through the earth, and debouch into an elevator that rushes us up to our
caves. Only between my house and the entrance to the Subway am I obliged
to step into the open air at all. A curious life! And I sit in my chair
and talk to people in multitudes of other caves near by, or caves in New
Jersey, Washington or Chicago.

Louis XI used to be called "the human spider" by reason of his industry,
but we modern office men are far more like human spiders than he, as we
sit in the center of our webs of invisible wires. We wait and wait, and
our lines run out across the length and breadth of the land--sometimes
getting tangled, to be sure, so that it is frequently difficult to
decide just which spider owns the web; but we sit patiently doing
nothing save devising the throwing out of other lines.

We weave, but we do not build; we manipulate, buy, sell and lend,
quarrel over the proceeds, and cover the world with our nets, while the
ants and the bees of mankind labor, construct and manufacture, and
struggle to harness the forces of Nature. We plan and others execute.
We dicker, arrange, consult, cajole, bribe, pull our wires and extort;
but we do it all in one place--the center of our webs and the webs are
woven in our caves.

I figure that I spend about six hours each day in my office; that I
sleep nearly nine hours; that I am in transit on surface cars and in
subways at least one hour and a half more; that I occupy another hour
and a half in bathing, shaving and dressing, and an hour lunching at
midday. This leaves a margin of five hours a day for all other
activities.

Could even a small portion of this time be spent consecutively in
reading in the evening, I could keep pace with current thought and
literature much better than I do; or if I spent it with my son and
daughters I should know considerably more about them than I do now,
which is practically nothing. But the fact is that every evening from
the firs