three. The trouble was that
his expensive courtship had taken every penny of his salary. With
competitors like Charley Greengay, you had to spend money or drop
out. Certain birds, he reflected ruefully, are supplied with more
attractive plumage when they are courting, but nature hadn't been so
thoughtful for men. When Percy reached the office in the morning he
climbed on his tall stool and leaned his arms on his ledger. He was
so glad to feel it there that he was faint and weak-kneed.

* * * * *

Oliver Remsen, Junior, had brought new blood into the Remsen Paper
Company. He married shortly after Percy Bixby did, and in the five
succeeding years he had considerably enlarged the company's business
and profits. He had been particularly successful in encouraging
efficiency and loyalty in the employees. From the time he came into
the office he had stood for shorter hours, longer holidays, and a
generous consideration of men's necessities. He came out of college
on the wave of economic reform, and he continued to read and think a
good deal about how the machinery of labor is operated. He knew more
about the men who worked for him than their mere office records.

Young Remsen was troubled about Percy Bixby because he took no
summer vacations--always asked for the two weeks' extra pay instead.
Other men in the office had skipped a vacation now and then, but
Percy had stuck to his desk for five years, had tottered to his
stool through attacks of grippe and tonsilitis. He seemed to have
grown fast to his ledger, and it was to this that Oliver objected.
He liked his men to stay men, to look like men and live like men. He
remembered how alert and wide-awake Bixby had seemed to him when he
himself first came into the office. He had picked Bixby out as the
most intelligent and interested of his father's employees, and since
then had often wondered why he never seemed to see chances to forge
ahead. Promotions, of course, went to the men who went after them.
When Percy's baby died, he went to the funeral, and asked Percy to
call on him if he needed money. Once when he chanced to sit down by
Bixby on the elevated and found him reading Bryce's "American
Commonwealth," he asked him to make use of his own large office
library. Percy thanked him, but he never came for any books. Oliver
wondered whether his bookkeeper really tried to avoid him.

One evening Oliver met the Bixbys in the lobby of a theater.