He could see every printed phrase as plainly as if he were reading it all himself. How many times in the old days had he not perused some such story over his morning coffee, thanking himself unconsciously that he was not as other men! How perfectly and smugly he had played the Pharisee for his own delight and satisfaction! He had not bothered then to cry his virtues aloud in the market place or to thank God publicly for his salvation. No, he was too self-sufficient to take the trouble to advertise his worthiness. To-night he was on the brink of disaster, and yet he found himself shuddering at the colorless fate to which his complacence might have condemned him. To have gone on forever in a state of drowsy contentment ... to have been surrounded on all sides by the thunderous cataracts of life and caught only the pretty significance of rainbows through the spray ... to have remained untouched by any and every primitive impulse and feeling--he could not now imagine anything more tragic. And yet, to-morrow, people would hold up the desirability of his former estate, pointing to him in warning for the soft-armed profit of an oncoming generation. He saw himself as he might have been, going on to the end of time in the service of Ford, Wetherbee & Co., rising from map clerk to counter man, to special agent, perhaps even to a managership, writing sharp or conciliatory letters to agents according to their importance, trimming office expense and shaving salaries, heckling green office boys, and, his workday ended, going home to _The Literary Digest_ and Helen, fresh from the triumphs of the golf links or the card table. Yes, no doubt Helen would have matched his own rise in fortune with equal gentility. Perhaps he might have taken an hour between office closing and dinner to wield a golf club himself ... bringing back a desirable guest to dinner or proposing through the telephone to Helen that they dine at the Palace or St. Francis... Yes, even at best his imagination could not do more with the material in hand. Indeed, he knew that he had crowded the very most that was possible on so small a canvas. This, then, had been his unconscious life plan, his unvoiced fate. Thus had he sketched it hazily, as a teller of tales sketches the plot of a story, such and such a sum being the total of all the characters and circumstances. But as he had gone on developing it, suddenly a new character had appeared to change the final figures--a wrench thrown into the wheel of continuity ... a wrench that bore the name of Axel Hilmer... He felt no bitterness now for the man. Had he ever felt it?