principal labour of the office was in checking over the estimates on the
Western tract.

Bob did his best because he was a true sportsman, and he had entered the
game, but he did not like it, and the slow, sleepy monotony of the
office, with its trivial tasks which he did not understand, filled him
with an immense and cloying languor. The firm seemed to be dying of the
sleeping sickness. Nothing ever happened. They filed their interminable
statistics, and consulted their interminable books, and marked squares
off their interminable maps, and droned along their monotonous,
unimportant life in the same manner day after day. Bob was used to
out-of-doors, used to exercise, used to the animation of free human
intercourse. He watched the clock in spite of himself. He made mistakes
out of sheer weariness of spirit, and in the footing of the long columns
of figures he could not summon to his assistance the slow, painstaking
enthusiasm for accuracy which is the sole salvation of those who would
get the answer. He was not that sort of chap.

But he was not a quitter, either. This was life. He tried
conscientiously to do his best in it. Other men did; so could he.

The winter moved on somnolently. He knew he was not making a success.
Harvey was inscrutable, taciturn, not to be approached. Fox seemed to
have forgotten his official existence, although he was hearty enough in
his morning greetings to the young man. The young bookkeeper, Archie,
was more friendly, but even he was a being apart, alien, one of the
strangely accurate machines for the putting down and docketing of these
innumerable and unimportant figures. He would have liked to know and
understand Bob, just as the latter would have liked to know and
understand him, but they were separated by a wide gulf in which whirled