to the street."

George started to thank him, but already the rotund figure was pressed
against the desk, and the tiny eyes absorbed in important-looking
papers.

Mundy, George decided, wasn't such an ogre after all. He wore glasses.
He was bald, thin, and stoop-shouldered. He had the benign expression of
a parson; but behind that bald forehead, George soon learned, was stored
all the knowledge he craved, without, however, the imagination to make
it personally very valuable.

If he didn't sweep the office at first, George approximated such labour,
straightening the desks of the mighty, checking up on the contents of
waste-paper baskets, seeing that the proper people got mail and
newspapers, running errands; and always, in the office or outside, he
kept his ears open and his eyes wide. He absorbed the patter of the
Street. He learned to separate men into classes, the wise ones, who
always made money, and the foolish, who now and then had good luck, but
most of the time were settling their losses. And at every opportunity he
was after what Mundy concealed behind his appearance of a parson.

At night he dissected the financial journals, watching the alterations
in the market, and probing for the causes; applying to this novitiate
the same grim determination he had brought to Squibs Bailly's lessons a
year before. Never once was he tempted to seek a simple path to fortune.

"When I speculate," he told himself, "there'll be mighty little risk
about it."

Even in those days his fifteen dollars a week condemned him to a cheap
lodging house near Lexington Avenue, the simplest of meals, and
practically no relaxation. He exercised each morning, and walked each
evening home from the office, for he hadn't forgotten what Princeton
expected from him in the fall.

Sylvia's photograph and the broken riding crop supervised his labours,
but he knew he couldn't hope, except by chance, to see her this summer.

One Saturday morning Goodhue came unexpectedly into the office and
carried him off to Long Island. George saw the tiny eyes of Blodgett
narrow.

Blodgett, perhaps because of Mr. Alston's letter, had condescended to
chat with George a number of times in the outer office. On the Monday
following he strolled up and jerked out:

"Wasn't that young Richard Goodhue I saw you going off with Saturday?"

"Yes sir."

"Know him well?"

"Very. We're in the same class. We're rooming together next year."

Blodgett grunted and wal