expected to find
it--far enough downtown to be downtown, and yet not so far downtown as
to make it a trouble to get there. Being on the eastern side of
Washington Square, it had a picturesque outlook, and the merit of
access from East Sixty-seventh Street through the long straight artery
of Fifth Avenue.

It was furnished, too, just as you might have known he would furnish
it, in the rich and sober Style Empire, and yet not so exclusively in
the Style Empire as to make the plain American business man fear he
had dropped into Napoleon's library at Malmaison. That is what
Rashleigh would have liked, but other men could do what in him would
be thought finicky. To take the "cuss" off his refinement, as he put
it to Barbara, he scattered modern American office bits among his
luscious brown surfaces, adorned with wreaths and lictors' sheaves in
gold, though to himself the wrong note was offensive.

But wrong notes and right notes were the same to him as, on this
particular morning, he dragged himself there because it was the hour.
His office staff in the person of old Mr. Radbury was already on the
spot, and had sorted the letters for the day. These were easily dealt
with. Reinvestment, or new opportunities for investment, were their
principal themes, and the only positive duty to attend to was in the
endorsement of dividend checks for deposit. A few directions being
given to Mr. Radbury as to such letters as were to be answered,
Allerton had nothing to do but stroll to the window and look out.

It was what he did perhaps fifty times in the course of the two or
three hours daily, or approximately daily, which he spent there. He
did so now. He did so because it put off for a few minutes longer the
fierce, exasperating, acrid pleasure of doing worse. To do worse had
been his avowed object in coming to the office that morning, and not
the answering of letters or the raking in of checks.

Looking down from his window on the tenth floor he asked himself the
fruitless question which millions of other men have asked when folly
has got them into trouble. Among these thousands who, viewed from that
height, had a curious resemblance to ants, was there such a fool as he
was? From the Square they streamed into Fifth Avenue; from Fifth
Avenue they streamed into the Square. In the Square and round the
Square they squirmed and wriggled and dawdled their seemingly aimless
ways. Great green lumbering omnibuses disgorged one pack of them