e Corporation whose ruin was to be that day's sensation, a colorless
man who had acquired middle age with his first long trousers and had
been dedicated to the commercial treadmill before he had bought a
safety-razor. He despised all loiterers along the primrose paths, and
John Valiant was but a decorative figurehead.

The bulldog lifted his head. The ghost of a furred throaty growl rumbled
in the silence, and the man at the desk shrank a little, as the hair
rippled up on the thick neck and the faithful red-rimmed eyes opened a
shade wider. But John Valiant did not turn. He was bitterly absorbed
with his own thoughts.

Till this moment he had never really known how proud he had always
been of the Corporation, of the fact that he was its founder's son.
His election to high office in the small coterie that controlled
its destinies he had known very well to be but the modern concrete
expression of his individual holdings, but it had nevertheless deeply
pleased him. The fleeting sense of power, the intimate touching of wide
issues in a city of Big Things had flattered him; for a while he had
dreamed of playing a great part, of pushing the activities of the
Corporation into new territory, invading foreign soil. He might have
done much, for he had begun with good equipment. He had read law, had
even been admitted to the bar. But to what had it come? A gradual
slipping back into the rut of careless amusement, the tacit assumption
of his prerogatives by other waiting hands. The huge wheels had
continued to turn, smoothly, inevitably, and he had drawn his dividends
... and that was all. John Valiant swallowed something that was very
like a sob.

As he stood trying to plumb the depth of the calamity, self-anger began
to stir and buzz in his heart like a great bee. Like a tingling X-ray
there went stabbing through the husk woven of a thousand inherent habits
the humiliating knowledge of his own uselessness. In those profitless
seasons through which he had sauntered, as he had strolled through his
casual years of college, he had given least of his time and thought to
the concern which had absorbed his father's young manhood. He, John
Valiant--one of its vice-presidents! waster, on whose expenditures there
had never been a limit, who had strewn with the foolish free-handedness
of a prodigal! Idler, with a reputation in three cities as a leader of
cotillions!

"Fool!" he muttered under his breath, and on the landscape outside the