The bookkeeper and the stenographers looked up in surprise. "What?" For a second Dalyrimple stared--then walked up to the desk. "Here's that data," he said brusquely. "I can't wait any longer." Mr. Hesse's face expressed surprise. It didn't matter what he did--just so he got out of this rut. In a dream he stepped from the elevator into the stock-room, and walking to an unused aisle, sat down on a box, covering his face with his hands. His brain was whirring with the frightful jar of discovering a platitude for himself. "I've got to get out of this," he said aloud and then repeated, "I've got to get out"--and he didn't mean only out of Macy's wholesale house. When he left at five-thirty it was pouring rain, but he struck off in the opposite direction from his boarding-house, feeling, in the first cool moisture that oozed soggily through his old suit, an odd exultation and freshness. He wanted a world that was like walking through rain, even though he could not see far ahead of him, but fate had put him in the world of Mr. Macy's fetid storerooms and corridors. At first merely the overwhelming need of change took him, then half-plans began to formulate in his imagination. "I'll go East--to a big city--meet people--bigger people--people who'll help me. Interesting work somewhere. My God, there MUST be." With sickening truth it occurred to him that his facility for meeting people was limited. Of all places it was here in his own town that he should be known, was known--famous--before the water of oblivion had rolled over him. You had to cut corners, that was all. Pull--relationship--wealthy marriages--- For several miles the continued reiteration of this preoccupied him and then he perceived that the rain had become thicker and more opaque in the heavy gray of twilight and that the houses were falling away. The district of full blocks, then of big houses, then of scattering little ones, passed and great sweeps of misty country opened out on both sides. It was hard walking here. The sidewalk had given place to a dirt road, streaked with furious brown rivulets that splashed and squashed around his shoes. Cutting corners--the words began to fall apart, forming curious phrasings--little illuminated pieces of themselves. They resolved into sentences, each of which had a strangely familiar ring. Cutting corners meant rejecting the old childhood principles that success came from faithfulness to duty, that evil was necessarily punished or virtue necessarily rewarded--that honest poverty was happier than corrupt riches. It meant being hard. This phrase appealed to him and he repeated it over and over. It had to do somehow with Mr. Macy and Charley Moore--the attitudes, the methods of each of them. He stopped and felt his clothes. He was drenched to the skin. He looked about him and, selecting a place in the fence where a tree sheltered it, perched himself there.