right
between nine and five; one had to be there to earn a living; but after
five, it was not to be thought of for one moment. The elevators which
ran on the stroke of five were never large enough to hold the throng
which besieged them.

The talk during lunch hour rarely, if ever, turned toward business,
except as said before, when it dealt with underpaid services. In the
spring and summer it was invariably of baseball, and scores of young
men knew the batting averages of the different players and the standing
of the clubs with far greater accuracy than they knew the standing or
the discounts of the customers of their employers. In the winter the
talk was all of dancing, boxing, or plays.

It soon became evident to Bok why scarcely five out of every hundred of
the young men whom he knew made any business progress. They were not
interested; it was a case of a day's work and a day's pay; it was not a
question of how much one could do but how little one could get away
with. The thought of how well one might do a given thing never seemed
to occur to the average mind.

"Oh, what do you care?" was the favorite expression. "The boss won't
notice it if you break your back over his work; you won't get any more
pay."

And there the subject was dismissed, and thoroughly dismissed, too.

Eventually, then, Bok learned that the path that led to success was
wide open: the competition was negligible. There was no jostling. In
fact, travel on it was just a trifle lonely. One's fellow-travellers
were excellent company, but they were few! It was one of Edward Bok's
greatest surprises, but it was also one of his greatest stimulants. To
go where others could not go, or were loath to go, where at least they
were not, had a tang that savored of the freshest kind of adventure.
And the way was so simple, so much simpler, in fact, than its
avoidance, which called for so much argument, explanation, and
discussion. One had merely to do all that one could do, a little more
than one was asked or expected to do, and immediately one's head rose
above the crowd and one was in an employer's eye--where it is always so
satisfying for an employee to be! And as so few heads lifted
themselves above the many, there was never any danger that they would
not be seen.

Of course, Edward Bok had to prove to himself that his conception of
conditions was right. He felt instinctively that it was, however, and
with this stimulus he bucked the li