For two years our bargain was faithfully kept, I usually going to his office at 26 Broadway. That in itself at the start, for one as unfamiliar as I was with the scene and customs of big business, was an adventure. My entrance and exit to Mr. Rogers’ office were carried on with a secrecy which never failed to amuse me. The alert, handsome, businesslike little chaps who received me at the entrance to the Rogers’ suite piloted me unerringly by a route where nobody saw me and I saw nobody into the same small room opening on to a court, and it seemed never the same route. I was not slow in discovering that across the court in the window directly opposite there was always stationed a gentleman whose head seemed to be turned my way whenever I looked across. It may have meant nothing at all. I only record the fact. The only person besides Mr. Rogers I ever met in those offices was his private secretary, Miss Harrison: a woman spoken of with awe at that date as having a $10,000 salary, one who knew her employer’s business from A to Z and whom he could trust absolutely. She radiated efficiency—business competency. Along with her competency went that gleam of hardness which efficient business women rarely escape. Miss Harrison appeared only on rare occasions when an extra document was needed. She was as impersonal as the chairs in the room. We discussed in these interviews, with entire frankness, the laws which they had flouted. I could not shock Mr. Rogers with records—not even when I confronted him one day with the testimony he had given on a certain point which he admitted was not according to the facts. He curtly dismissed the subject. “They had no business prying into my private affairs.” As for rebates, “Somebody would have taken them if we had not.” “But with your strength, Mr. Rogers,” I argued, “you could have forced fair play on the railroads and on your competitors.” “Ah,” he said, “but there was always somebody without scruples in competition, however small that somebody might be. He might grow.” There it was, the obsession of the Standard Oil Company, that danger lurked in small as well as great things, that nothing, however trivial, must live outside of its control. These talks made me understand as I could not from the documents themselves the personal point of view of independents like Mr. Rogers who had been gathered into the organization in the first decade of monopoly making. For instance, there was Mr. Rogers’ reason for desiring the trust agreement made in 1882: