al ability and in
experience. I felt that I should be guilty of insolence if I offered him
any advice, and of something worse than insolence if I insisted on my
advice being taken. Yet it was just this which Mrs. Ascher expected of
me, and I did not want to disappoint her.

It is true that I was a shareholder in the New Excelsior Cash Register
Company. I may have been a director. Gorman said something about my
being a director. I had accepted the office, pledged beforehand to the
approval of Gorman's policy and therefore had no right to intervene.
What claim had I to insist on Ascher's doing this or that? I should
not feel myself justified in calling on an archbishop and insisting
on drastic alterations in the Apostle's Creed. Ascher is at least an
archbishop, possibly a patriarch, or even a cardinal, in that truly
catholic church which worships Mammon.

But I had promised.

I went to the office next morning, early. Having forgotten to make an
appointment with Ascher beforehand I had to wait some time before I saw
him. I sat in the large anteroom through which I had passed when I first
visited the office with Gorman. Through the glass door I was able to see
the public office outside where men went busily to and fro.

I understood just enough about this business of Ascher's to be able to
read romance, the romance which was certainly there, in the movements
of the quiet men who passed and repassed before my eyes, or bent with
rarely lifted heads over huge ledgers, or turned over with deft fingers
piles of papers in stuffed filing boxes. These men were in touch with
the furthest ends of the earth. Coded telegrams fluttered from their
hands and went vibrating across thousands of miles of land or through
the still depths of oceans, over unlighted tracts of ooze on the
sea-bottom. In London the words were read and men set free pent up,
dammed streams of money. In Hongkong the words were read and some
steamer went out, laden, from her harbour. Gold was poured into the
hands of tea-planters in Ceylon. Scanty wages in strange coins, dribbled
out to factory workers in Russian cotton mills. Gangs of navvies went to
work laying railway lines across the veldt in Bechuanaland. There was no
end to the energy controlled, directed by these cable messages, nor any
bounds to the field of their influence. Somewhere in Ireland a farmer
would go home along a desolate road, crossing brown bogs, thirsty and
disconsolate, his lean beasts un