decline, a world of sober-sided warehouses, degenerating into slums,
circumscribed by sleepy South Street; all, this afternoon, warm and
languorous in the lazy breeze of a sunny April Saturday.

The counting-room was a cubicle contrived by enclosing a corner of the
ground-floor with two walls and a ceiling of match-boarding. Into this
constricted space were huddled two imposing roll-top desks, P.
Sybarite's high counter, and the small flat desk of the shipping
clerk, with an iron safe, a Remington typewriter, a copy-press, sundry
chairs and spittoons, a small gas-heater, and many tottering columns
of dusty letter-files. The window-panes, encrusted with perennial
deposits of Atmosphere, were less transparent than translucent, and so
little the latter that electric bulbs burned all day long whenever the
skies were overcast. Also, the windows were fixed and set against the
outer air--impregnable to any form of assault less impulsive than a
stone cast by an irresponsible hand. A door, set craftily in the most
inconvenient spot imaginable, afforded both ventilation and access to
an aisle which led tortuously between bales of hides to doors opening
upon a waist-high stage, where trucks backed up to receive and to
deliver.

Immured in this retreat, P. Sybarite was very much shut away from all
joy of living--alone with his job (which at present nothing pressed)
with Giant Despair and its interlocutor Ennui, and with that blatant,
brutish, implacable Smell of Smells....

To all of these, abruptly and with ceremony, Mr. George Bross,
shipping clerk, introduced himself: a brawny young man in
shirt-sleeves, wearing a visorless cap of soiled linen, an apron of
striped ticking, pencils behind both angular red ears, and a smudge of