s
mail since early morning.

Rousing the sleepy boy in charge of the all-night elevator, he had
himself lifted to his office floor. The upper corridor was dimly
lighted, and on leaving the car he went directly to the door of his
private room, walking swiftly and neither seeing nor hearing a man who,
materializing mysteriously out of the corridor shadows, followed him
step by step.

In the office Blount snapped the lights on and turned to unlock his
desk. As the key clicked in the lock the sixth sense, which is perhaps
only a mingling of the subtler essences of the other five, warned him
sharply, and he wheeled to face the door which had been left on the
latch. As he looked, the door opened silently and the materializing
shadow, haggard of face and with bloodshot eyes mirroring blind rage and
the terror of a cornered rat, slipped into the room and stood warily
aside out of the direct light from the electric chandelier. Blount
looked again and swore softly. The dodging intruder was the man Thomas
Gryson.

XXII

THE ICONOCLAST

It is a threadbare saying that the environment moulds the man. Yet, much
more than the philosophers have contended, there are chameleon
tendencies in the strongest character, and one finely determining to
coerce his surroundings is quite likely to end by realizing that the
surroundings have appealed to unsuspected color-changings in himself.
Thus it may chance that the fairest fighter, finding himself
sufficiently kicked and cuffed in the rough-and-tumble, will discover
how facilely easy it is to descend to the level of his antagonists, and
from this discovery to the awakening of the remorseless passion for
success at any price is but a step, long or short according to the
exigencies of the struggle.

Checked in his luggage, if not precisely pinned openly upon his sleeve,
Blount had brought with him from the scholastic banks of the Charles a
choice assortment of ideals, which are things precious only as they can
be preserved inviolate. But for weeks, endless weeks as they seemed to
him in the retrospect, he had been rubbing shoulders with a crude world
which appeared to care little for ideals and less for the man who upheld
them. Inevitably, as he had admitted to Gantry, the change was wrought,
or working; the exclamation springing to his lips when he recognized
Gryson evinced it, and when he beckoned the shifty intruder to the chair
at the desk end the ruthless _zeitgeist_ had take