semi-fire-proof, but more semi
than fire-proof. It stands on Nassau Street, between two portly stone
buildings that try to squeeze this lanky impostor to death, but there is
more cheerful whistling in its hallways than in the halls of its
disapproving neighbors. Near it is City Hall Park and Newspaper Row,
Wall Street and the lordly Stock Exchange, but, aside from a few dull
and honest tenants like Mr. Troy Wilkins, the Septimus Building is
filled with offices of fly-by-night companies--shifty promoters,
mining-concerns, beauty-parlors for petty brokers, sample-shoe shops,
discreet lawyers, and advertising dentists. Seven desks in one large
room make up the entire headquarters of eleven international
corporations, which possess, as capital, eleven hundred and thirty
dollars, much embossed stationery--and the seven desks. These modest
capitalists do not lease their quarters by the year. They are doing very
well if they pay rent for each of four successive months. But also they
do not complain about repairs; they are not fussy about demanding a
certificate of moral perfection from the janitor. They speak cheerily to
elevator-boys and slink off into saloons. Not all of them keep Yom
Kippur; they all talk of being "broad-minded."

Mr. Wilkins's office was small and agitated. It consisted of two rooms
and an insignificant entry-hall, in which last was a water-cooler, a
postal scale, a pile of newspapers, and a morose office-boy who drew
copies of Gibson girls all day long on stray pieces of wrapping-paper,
and confided to Una, at least once a week, that he wanted to take a
correspondence course in window-dressing. In one of the two rooms Mr.
Wilkins cautiously made drawings at a long table, or looked surprised
over correspondence at a small old-fashioned desk, or puffed and
scratched as he planned form-letters to save his steadily waning
business.

In the other room there were the correspondence-files, and the desks of
Una, the chief stenographer, and of slangy East-Side Bessie Kraker, who
conscientiously copied form-letters, including all errors in them, and
couldn't, as Wilkins complainingly pointed out, be trusted with
dictation which included any words more difficult than "sincerely."

From their window the two girls could see the windows of an office
across the street. About once a month an interesting curly-haired youth
leaned out of one of the windows opposite. Otherwise there was no view.

Sec. 4

Twelve o'c