mildest rebuke. But the head office boy blushed awkwardly--why he did
not know and could not discover, though he often cogitated upon it. She
remained Miss Hallowell.

Opposites suggest each other. The dimmest personality in those offices
was the girl whose name imaged to everyone little more than a pencil,
notebook, and typewriting machine. The vividest personality was
Frederick Norman. In the list of names upon the outer doors of the
firm's vast labyrinthine suite, on the seventeenth floor of the
Syndicate Building, his name came last--and, in the newest lettering,
suggesting recentness of partnership. In age he was the youngest of the
partners. Lockyer was archaic, Sanders an antique; Benchley, actually
only about fifty-five, had the air of one born in the grandfather class.
Lockyer the son dyed his hair and affected jauntiness, but was in fact
not many years younger than Benchley and had the stiffening jerky legs
of one paying for a lively youth. Norman was thirty-seven--at the age
the Greeks extolled as divine because it means all the best of youth
combined with all the best of manhood. Some people thought Norman
younger, almost boyish. Those knew him uptown only, where he hid the man
of affairs beneath the man of the world-that-amuses-itself. Some people
thought he looked, and was, older than the age with which the
biographical notices credited him. They knew him down town only--where
he dominated by sheer force of intellect and will.

As has been said, the firm ranked among the greatest in New York.
It was a trusted counselor in large affairs--commercial, financial,
political--in all parts of America, in all parts of the globe, for many
of its clients were international traffickers. Yet this young man, this
youngest and most recent of the partners, had within the month forced a
reorganization of the firm--or, rather, of its profits--on a basis that