At the rear of the office they slipped on their office coats. Brauer took a comb from his pocket and began carefully to define the part in his already slick hair. Starratt went forward. In the center of the room the chief stenographer stood, putting her formidable array of pencils through the sharpener. She glanced up at Starratt with a complacent smile. "Oh, good morning, Mr. Starratt!" she purred, archly. "What's new with you?" "Not a thing in the world," he answered, ironically, and he began to arrange some memoranda in one of the wire baskets on his desk... At nine thirty the boy brought him his share of the mail from the back office, and in ten minutes he was deeply absorbed in sorting the "daily reports" from the various agencies. He worked steadily, interrupted by an occasional phone call, an order from the chief clerk, the arrival and departure of business associates and clients. Above the hum of subdued office conversation the click of typewriting machines and the incessant buzzing of the desk telephones, he was conscious of hearing the same question repeated with monotonous fidelity: "Hello! What's new with you?" And as surely, either through his own lips or the lips of another, the identical reply always came: "Not a thing in the world!" At half past eleven he stopped deliberately and stood for a moment, nervously fingering his tie. He was thinking about the course of action that he had decided upon in that long, unusual vigil of the night before. His uncertainty lasted until the remembrance of his wife's scornful question swept over him: "Why aren't you doing something?... Everybody else is!" But it was the answer he had made that committed him irrevocably to his future course: "Perhaps I am. You don't know everything." He had felt a sense of fatality bound up in these words of defiant pretense, once they had escaped him...a fatality which the blazing contempt of his wife's retort had emphasized. Even now his cheeks burned with the memory of that unleashed insult: "What can _you_ do?" No, there was no turning back now. His own self-esteem could not deny so clear-cut a challenge. He called his assistant. "I wish you'd go into the private office and see if Mr. Ford is at leisure," he ordered. "I want to have a talk with him." The youth came back promptly. "He says for you to come," was his brief announcement. Fred Starratt stared a moment and, recovering himself, walked swiftly in upon his employer. Mr. Ford was signing insurance policies. "Well, Starratt," he said, looking up smilingly, "what's the good word?... What's new with you?" Starratt squared himself desperately. "Nothing...except I find it impossible to live upon my salary." Mr. Ford laid aside his pen. "Oh, that's unfortunate!... Suppose you sit down and we'll talk it over." Starratt dropped into the nearest seat.