e of glass. Just about that time
the Pippin went out in a black smolder, and from a nearby church, hidden
between great sky-scrapers, a big ding-dong bell said resonantly that it
was half-past one.

He returned to the office. Every afternoon, now, was a tingling trial. He
worked with head down, sweating with repression. An obsession tormented
him. He wanted to walk out of his glass cage. Out, not through the door,
but through the glass. Not gently, like Alice going into Wonderland, but
with ostentation and violence, with a heralding crash of shattered panes,
scandalously. Out of his cage, into the next; out of that, into the next;
from one end of the big room, in fact, to the other, crashingly, through
cage after cage--and then out upon the street through the plate front.
Half-past five finally freed him; and taking his place in a packed
herring-box on wheels, he was rolled back to Dolly--and the shearing.

Thus for a while did the young people live securely on a clown's
tissue-paper hoop. Then one evening, just as Charles-Norton, after
successfully resisting all day his anarchistic glass-smashing impulse,
was watching the hands of the clock approach the minute that was to free
him, his chief, raising his bald head at the end of his long, thin neck,
said casually, "We work all night, to-night, you know, Mr. Sims."

CHAPTER VII

"We work all night to-night, Mr. Sims." It is always with just such a
sentence, quiet, drab, and seemingly insignificant, that Mr. Catastrophe
introduces himself.

"Yes?" said Charles-Norton, adjusting his neck-tie and looking at the
calendar.

He was not surprised, for this happened twice a year. Twice a year, on a
day in December and a day in June, a part of the force worked all night
to prepare a statistical table for the benefit of the stockholders.

He telephoned to Dolly. Her voice came to him over the wire in a scared
little squeak. "Oh, Goosie," she pleaded; "come up before starting in
again. I'll let you go off right away. But please come up, please do!"

"Can't," shouted Charles-Norton. "We're allowed only an hour for dinner,
and it would take more than that just to go up and back."

"They won't care if you are a little late," suggested Dolly.

"No, can't come up," said Charles-Norton, astonished at his own firmness
(it is much easier to be firm over a telephone, anyway). "There's too
much to do. I'll be up in the morning, maybe."

"But Goo-oo-sie----"

"Nope. Can'