his evenings except Monday
were taken up with night school, whereupon Miss Dunlap, in order
to keep abreast of his mental development, decided to take a
correspondence course in Esperanto.

It transpired also that his attentions toward the Lackawanna had
been misconstrued, for one night when Phoebe bade him adieu in the
vestibule she broke down and wept upon his shoulder, saying that his
coldness hurt her. She confessed that a rate clerk in the freight
department wanted to marry her, and she supposed she'd have to accept
his dastardly proposal because a girl couldn't go on working all
her life, could she? Then Miss Gratz, of the C. & E.I., following a
red-letter night at Grand Opera, succeeded by a German pancake and a
stein at the Edelweiss and a cab-ride home, took Louis gravely to task
for his extravagance and hinted that he ought to have a permanent
manager who took an interest in him, one who loved music as he did and
whose tastes were simple and Teutonic.

When the literary lady of the Northwestern declined a trip to the
White City and began to read Marion Crawford aloud to him Louis awoke
to the gravity of the situation.

But before he had worked the matter out in his own mind that rate
clerk of whom Miss Lackawanna had spoken dropped in at Comer &
Mathison's, introduced himself to Mitchell and told him, with a degree
of firmness which could not be ignored, that his attentions to Miss
Phoebe Snow were distasteful. He did not state to whom. Louis's caller
had the physical proportions of a "white hope," and he wasted few
words. He had come to nail up a vacate notice, and he announced simply
but firmly that Miss Snow's Wednesday evenings were to be considered
open time thereafter, and if Mitchell elected to horn his way in it
was a hundred-to-one shot that he'd have to give up solid foods for a
month or more and take his nourishment through a glass tube.

Nor were the young man's troubles confined to the office. Miss Harris,
it seemed, had seen him with a different lady each night she and Mr.
Gross had been out, and had drawn her own conclusions, so, therefore,
when he tried to talk to her she flared up and called him a dissipated
roue, and threatened to have the head bookkeeper give him a thrashing
if he dared to accost her again.

Now the various apartments where Mitchell had been calling, these past
months, were opulently furnished with gifts from the representatives
of the various railway supply houses of