if he is
nine parts good, the old Adam in him must burn out one way or another in
his youth, or there comes a danger period at the height of his middle
life when his submerged tenth that has been smouldering for years flares
up and destroys him. Wherefore the problem which we have never been able
to solve, though we have talked it over in the office a dozen times:
whether John Markley had begun to feel, before he met the Hobart woman,
that he wasn't getting enough out of life for the money he had invested
in it; or whether she put the notion in his head.

It is scarcely correct to speak of his having met her, for she grew up
in the town, and had been working for the Markley Mortgage and
Investment Company for half-a-dozen years before he began to notice her.
From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her
into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell
her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had
married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music
teaching and failed, china painting and failed, she learned stenography
by sheer force of her own will, with no instruction save that in her
book, and opened an office for such work as she could get, while aiming
for the best job in town--the position of cashier and stenographer for
the Markley Mortgage Company. It took her three years to get in and
another year to make herself invaluable. She was big and strong, did the
work of two men for the pay of one, and for five years John Markley, who
saw that she had plenty of work to do, did not seem to know that she was
on earth. But one day "Alphabetical" Morrison, who was in our office
picking up his bundle of exchanges, looked rather idly out of the
window, and suddenly rested his roving eyes upon John Markley and Mrs.
Hobart, standing and talking in front of the post office. The man at the
desk near Morrison happened to be looking out at that moment, and he,
too, saw what Morrison saw--which was nothing at all, except a man
standing beside a woman. Probably the pair had met in exactly the same
place at exactly the same time, and had exchanged an idle word daily for
five years! and no one had noticed it, but that day Morrison
unconsciously put his hand to his chin and scratched his jaw, and his
eyes and the man's at the desk beside him met in a surprised
interrogation, and Morrison's mouth and nose twitched, and the other man
said, as he