The way all other men in that bank worked! I can never forget it. And the little they got out of it! The average American business man, for all his work and worry, gets a home in which to sleep, spend his Sundays and an occasional holiday. In spite of this—perhaps because of it—he is the most idealistic of God’s creatures. Behind all his work, be it mad hustle or deadly grind, there is a woman—his woman, the one woman in all the world to him. It is of her he thinks, it is for her he slaves. His adored woman, that girl of his dreams must have, shall have everything that he can win for her at any cost to himself. I know, because at the T. Z. I studied the American business man in his natural habitat—I talked with him, rubbed elbows with him while he was hustling and when he was grinding his hardest. How often did I see a man, when called to the telephone, pick up the receiver with indifference. Then on hearing the voice at the other end of the wire his face would brighten until it beamed, and his voice would change from the resentful tone of having his work interrupted to a loving purr. It was watching the men at work in the T. Z. that I discovered the reason why our business men prefer musical comedy to high-brow drama—it comes nearer visualizing their dreams. God bless them!—American business men. That I worked among them only six weeks was entirely my own fault, a fault for which I have often reproached myself. Had it not been for Turpin and Hoolagan—or rather had those two unworthies crossed my path later on during my four years’ experience, after I had acquired a greater amount of self-control—I might not have gone to Mr. Morton before the end of my third week and assured him that I did not like bank work, and never would like it. Yet had I remained at the T. Z. until our soldiers returned from abroad I would not have worked in the tenements of New York City. Without what I saw and learned there my four years’ experience would hardly have been worth writing. It was working in the tenements, living in the tenements on my wages that showed me what the working man and woman are up against—how they face their problems, and how they feel about present-day conditions. It was there, too, that I realized the menace of idle women to American ideals and institutions. CHAPTER XI I AM SICK IN THE UNDERBRUSH