ess, pleasure, and
obscenity--at the Market, at Collins & Wheeland's, at Hjul's coffee
house, at Grover's Lunchroom--everywhere that clerks forgathered to
appease their hunger and indulge in idle speculations. Sometimes he
got these things indirectly through chance slips in talks with his
friends, again scraps of overheard conversation reached his ears.
Quite frequently a frank or a coarse acquaintance, without
embarrassment or reserve, would tell him what had been said. He soon
got over protesting. If he convinced anybody that he was getting
Hilmer's business without financial concessions, he had to take the
nasty alternative which the smirks of his audience betrayed... It
would not have been so bad if he could have explained the situation to
himself, but any attempt to solve the riddle moved in a vicious
circle. He used to long for a simplicity that would make him accept
Hilmer's favors on their face value. Why couldn't one believe in
friendship and disinterestedness? Perhaps it would have been easier if
he had lacked any knowledge of Hilmer's philosophy of life. Starratt
couldn't remember anything in the recital of Hilmer's past performance
or his present attitude that dovetailed with benevolence... He
retreated, baffled from these speculative tilts, to the refuge of a
comforting conviction that fortunately no man was thoroughly
consistent. Perhaps therein lay the secret of Hilmer's puzzling
prodigality--because, boiled down to hard facts, it was apparent that
Hilmer was making Starratt & Co. a present of several hundred dollars
a year. Sometimes, in a wild flight of conjecture, he used to wonder
how far his argument with Hilmer regarding the ethics of being a
negative party to another man's dishonesty had been borne home? It
seemed almost too fantastic to fancy that he could have put over his
rather finely spun business morality in such a brief flash, if at all.

At first he had plunged in too speedily to his venture to formulate
many ideals of business conduct, but as he had progressed he found his
standards springing to life full grown.

He had been long enough in the insurance business to realize the
estimate that average clients had of an insurance broker--they looked
upon him as a struggling friend or a poor relation or an agreeable,
persuasive grafter, whose only work consisted in talking them into
indifferent acceptance of an insurance policy and then pestering them
into a reluctant payment of the premium.