ated
engine of goods and personalities. But he learned to utter, when called
upon, a few suave generalities, barbed with a rollicking story. This
made him always welcome. He was of a studious disposition, and liked
to examine this queer territory of life with an unprejudiced eye. After
all, his inward secret purpose had nothing to do with the success or
failure of retail trade. He was still seeking a horizon that would stay
blue when he reached it.

More and more he was interested to perceive how transparent the mummery
of business was. He was interested to note how persistently men fled
from success, how carefully most of them avoided the obvious principles
of utility, honesty, prudence, and courtesy, which are inevitably
rewarded. These sagacious, humorous fellows who were amusing themselves
with twaddling trade apothegms and ridiculous banqueteering solemnities,
surely they were aware that this had no bearing upon their own jobs?
He suspected that it was all a feverish anodyne to still some inward
unease. Since they must (not being fools) be aware that these antics
were mere subtraction of time from their business, the obvious
conclusion was, they were not happy with business. There was some
strange wistfulness in the conduct of Big Business Dogs, he thought.
Under the pretence of transacting affairs, they were really trying to
discover something that had eluded them.

The same thing, strangely enough, seemed to be going on in a sphere of
which he knew nothing, the world of art. He gathered from the papers
that writers, painters, musicians, were holding shindies almost every
night, at which delightful rebels, too busy to occupy themselves with
actual creation, talked charmingly about their plans. Poets were reading
poems incessantly, forgetting to write any. Much of the newspaper
comment on literature made him shudder, for though this was a province
quite strange to him, he had sound instincts. He discerned fatal
ignorance and absurdity between the pompous lines. Yet, in its own way,
it seemed a bold and honest ignorance. Were these, too, like the wistful
executives, seeking where the blue begins?

But what was this strange agitation that forbade his fellow-creatures
from enjoying the one thing that makes achievement possible--Solitude?
He himself, so happy to be left alone--was no one else like that? And
yet this very solitude that he craved and revelled in was, by a sublime
paradox, haunted by mysterious lonelin