What were they saying? That he was a joke, a failure? That he had been in this chair seven years? That he was a big, snubbed, defeated, over-worked handy-man about this big, loosely organized office? That in seven years he had neither been able to get himself promoted nor discharged? No doubt! As if to get away from the thought, John turned from his typewriter to the open window and looked out. There was the spire of the grand old First Church down there below him. Yonder were the sky-notching business blocks of the pushing city of Los Angeles, as it was in the early nineteen hundreds. There, too, were the villa-crowned heights to the north, shut in at last by the barren ridges of the Sierra Madre Mountains, some of which, in this month of January, were snow-capped. But here were these foolish men still nodding and whispering. Good fellows, too, but blind. What did they know about him really? They knew that he was a stenographer, but they did not know that he was a stenographer to the glory of God!—one who cleaned his typewriter, dusted his desk, opened the mail, wrote his letters, ate, walked, slept, all to the honor of his creator—that the whole of life to him was a sort of sacrament. They thought he was beaten and discouraged, an industrial slave, drawn helplessly into the cogs. They, poor, purblind materialists, were without vision. They did not know that there were finer things than pickles and crude oil. They did not know that he was to soar; that already his wings were budding, nor that he lived in an inner state of spiritual exaltation as delicious as it was unsuspected. They pitied him; they laughed commiseratingly. He did not want their commiseration; he spurned their laughter and their pity. He was full of youth and the exuberance of hope. He was full of an expanding strength that made him stronger as his dream grew brighter. Only his eyes were tired. The cross lights were bad. For a moment he shaded his brow tenderly with his hand, reflecting that he must hereafter use an eye-shade by day as methodically he used one in his nightly study. The morning moved along. The yearning orange shipper went away. One mourner rose and passed inside. The other waited impatiently for his turn to do the same. Luncheon time came for John, and he ate it in the file room—ravenously; and while he ate he read—the Congressional Record; and reading, made notations on the margin, for John was preparing for what he was preparing, although he did not quite know what. The train of destiny was rumbling along, and when it stopped at his station, he proposed to swing on board. His luncheon down swiftly, as much through hunger as through haste, he swung out of the door, bound for Charles Kenton, "actor—temporarily disengaged—Hotel Albemarle—terms reasonable," moving with such headlong speed that he was soon within that self-important presence.