brutal, unjust,
ill-tempered, and Jones had been almost persuaded out of his settled
policy of contempt into answering back. Everything seemed to have gone
amiss, and the man's coarse, underbred nature had been in the ascendant
all day long: he had thumped the desk with his great fists, abused,
found fault unreasonably, uttered outrageous things, and behaved
generally as he actually was--beneath the thin veneer of acquired
business varnish. He had done and said everything to wound all that was
woundable in an ordinary secretary, and though Jones fortunately dwelt
in a region from which he looked down upon such a man as he might look
down on the blundering of a savage animal, the strain had nevertheless
told severely upon him, and he reached home wondering for the first time
in his life whether there was perhaps a point beyond which he would be
unable to restrain himself any longer.

For something out of the usual had happened. At the close of a passage
of great stress between the two, every nerve in the secretary's body
tingling from undeserved abuse, the Manager had suddenly turned full
upon him, in the corner of the private room where the safes stood, in
such a way that the glare of his red eyes, magnified by the glasses,
looked straight into his own. And at this very second that other
personality in Jones--the one that was ever _watching_--rose up swiftly
from the deeps within and held a mirror to his face.

A moment of flame and vision rushed over him, and for one single
second--one merciless second of clear sight--he saw the Manager as the
tall dark man of his evil dreams, and the knowledge that he had suffered
at his hands some awful injury in the past crashed through his mind like
the report of a cannon.

It all flashed upon him and was gone, changing him from fire to ice,
and then back again to fire; and he left the office with the certain
conviction in his heart that the time for his final settlement with the
man, the time for the inevitable retribution, was at last drawing very
near.

According to his invariable custom, however, he succeeded in putting
the memory of all this unpleasantness out of his mind with the changing
of his office coat, and after dozing a little in his leather chair
before the fire, he started out as usual for dinner in the Soho French
restaurant, and began to dream himself away into the region of flowers
and singing, and to commune with the Invisibles that were the very
sources of