two rooms, one in front and one behind, L-shaped, and set in the elbow of the building, so that one might look out at the two projecting wings of the building and see lighted layers of offices, in which the actors of a dozen enterprises “took” dictation, clattered at typewriters, walked back and forth importantly, talked into telephones or, what they did with amazing frequency, folded their palms behind their skulls, placed their feet restfully on the nearest solid object, and gazed for long periods dreamily and tenderly at the ceilings.
Through the broad and usually very dirty panes of the window in the front office one could catch a glimpse of Faneuil Hall and the magnificent and exultant activity of the markets.
These dingy offices, however, from which a corner of this rich movement might be seen and felt, were merely the unlovely counterpart of millions of others throughout the country and, in the telling phrase of Baedeker, offered “little that need detain the tourist”: a few chairs, two scarred roll-top desks, a typist’s table, a battered safe with a pile of thumb-worn ledgers on top of it, a set of green filing cases, an enormous green, greasy water-jar always half filled with a rusty liquid that no one drank, and two spittoons, put there because Brill was a man who chewed and spat widely in all directions—this, save for placards, each bearing several photographs of houses with their prices written below them—8 rooms, Dorchester, $6500; 5 rooms and garage, Melrose, $4500, etc.—completed the furniture of the room, and the second room, save for the disposition of objects, was similarly adorned.
Such, then, was the scene in which the old man and his nephew met again after a separation of eight years.
X
The youth was drowned in the deepest sea—an atom bombarded, ignorant of all defence in a tumultuous world. The shell of custom, the easy thoughtless life which had sucked pleasure from the world about, these four years past, crumbled like caked mud. He was nothing, nobody—there was no heart or bravery left in him; he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance—the beginning, as Socrates suggested, of wisdom—he was lost.
He had wanted to cut a figure in the world—he had simply never imagined
