d half audibly.

How the people whom he passed, their faces speaking city keenness of
ambition, must envy his position! How little reason they had to envy him,
he thought, as he walked around the great building and saw his name
glaring at him in gilt letters over the plate-glass windows and on all
the delivery wagons, open-mouthed for the packages being wheeled out
under the long glass awning.

"A whole block now! Yes, the doctor was right. It must be thirty instead
of twenty millions!" he concluded, as his vision swept the straight-line,
window-checkered mass of the twelve stories. "And I do wish we had a
tower! If one could go up on top of a tower and look out over the range
now and then and breathe deep, it would help."

When he entered the main door he paused in a maze, gazing at the acreage
of counters manned by clerks and the aisles swarming with shoppers under
the glare of the big, electric globes, and listening to the babble of
shrill talk, the calls of the elevator boys, the coughing of the
pneumatic tubes and the clang of the elevator doors. It was all like some
devilishly complicated dream from which he would never awake. He must
have a little time in order to orient himself before he could think
rationally. The roar of the train still obsessed him; the air in the
store seemed more stifling than that of the sleeper.

So he decided that, rather than be shot up into The Presence by the
elevator, he would gradually scale the heights. Ascending stairway after
stairway, he ranged back and forth over the floors, a stranger in his
own wonderland. When he reached the eleventh floor, with only one more to
the offices, the whole atmosphere seemed suddenly to turn rare with
expectancy; a rustle to run through all the goods on the counters; the
very Paris gowns among which he was standing to be called to martial
attention.

"The boss!" he heard one of the model girls say.

Turning to follow her nod toward the stairway, Jack saw, two-thirds of
the way up the broad flight, a man past middle age, in dark gray suit and
neutral tie, rubbing his palms together as he surveyed a stratum of his
principality. The sight of him to Jack was like the touch of a myriad
electric needles that pricked sharply, without exhilaration.

"The boss is likely to run up that way any time of the day," said the
model girl to a customer; "and what he don't see don't count!"

"Not much older; not much changed!" thought Jack; and his realizati