em to have been mere vanity and ambition that
stimulated the former; whereas the motive force which drove Henry Mills
to defy Nature and attempt dancing was the purer one of love. He did it
to please his wife. Had he never gone to Ye Bonnie Briar-Bush Farm,
that popular holiday resort, and there met Minnie Hill, he would
doubtless have continued to spend in peaceful reading the hours not
given over to work at the New York bank at which he was employed as
paying-cashier. For Henry was a voracious reader. His idea of a
pleasant evening was to get back to his little flat, take off his coat,
put on his slippers, light a pipe, and go on from the point where he
had left off the night before in his perusal of the BIS-CAL volume of
the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_--making notes as he read in a stout
notebook. He read the BIS-CAL volume because, after many days, he had
finished the A-AND, AND-AUS, and the AUS-BIS. There was something
admirable--and yet a little horrible--about Henry's method of study. He
went after Learning with the cold and dispassionate relentlessness of a
stoat pursuing a rabbit. The ordinary man who is paying instalments on
the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ is apt to get over-excited and to
skip impatiently to Volume XXVIII (VET-ZYM) to see how it all comes out
in the end. Not so Henry. His was not a frivolous mind. He intended to
read the _Encyclopaedia_ through, and he was not going to spoil
his pleasure by peeping ahead.

It would seem to be an inexorable law of Nature that no man shall shine
at both ends. If he has a high forehead and a thirst for wisdom, his
fox-trotting (if any) shall be as the staggerings of the drunken;
while, if he is a good dancer, he is nearly always petrified from the
ears upward. No better examples of this law could have been found than
Henry Mills and his fellow-cashier, Sidney Mercer. In New York banks
paying-cashiers, like bears, tigers, lions, and other fauna, are always
shut up in a cage in pairs, and are consequently dependent on each
other for entertainment and social intercourse when business is slack.
Henry Mills and Sidney simply could not find a subject in common.
Sidney knew absolutely nothing of even such elementary things as Abana,
Aberration, Abraham, or Acrogenae; while Henry, on his side, was
scarcely aware that there had been any developments in the dance since
the polka. It was a relief to Henry when Sidney threw up his job to
join the chorus of a musical comedy, a