“I have slightly less than one thousand dollars----” “Could you raise one thousand dollars?” “With some effort.” “Of course, it will draw interest for you----” “I understand these affairs.” The matter was referred to the next day when it was decided to accept Bellair’s amount of one thousand dollars, which Lot & Company could not touch without his consent, except in the event of his departure with company funds; and which Bellair could not draw without written statement from Lot & Company to the effect that he was leaving with a balanced account. Thereafter he was one with Mr. Sproxley in the financial management, under the eye of Seth Wetherbee. One by one he learned the points of the system. Wherever the accounts had run over a series of years, there were byways of loot. These pilferings were not made at once, on the same basis that a gardener does not cut asparagus for market from young roots. The plants were encouraged to establish themselves. After that the open market was supplied with a certain output, the rest belonging to Lot & Company’s table. It frequently occurred to Bellair with a sort of enveloping darkness that he had the institution in his power; and with a different but equal force that he had a life position in all naturalness; that his life would be spent with slowly increasing monetary reward for juggling the different accounts--the field of crooked canes which was the asparagus-bed of Lot & Company. He did not like it. He was not happy; and yet he realised that the adjustments his nature had already made to the facts, suggested an entire adjustment later, the final easy acceptance. 3 Bellair had thought many times of getting out from under the die, but it never came to him with quite the force as on that Monday morning, after watching the _Jade_ fare forth from the Brooklyn water-front. Something had turned within him as a result of that little pilgrimage, something that spurred to radicalism and self-assertion. At no time had Bellair credited himself with a fairer honesty than most men. He had never given it a large part of thinking. Roughly he had believed that to be honest is the common lot. The corruption in the office which he could not assimilate had to do with extensive ramifications, its lying to itself. The instant seizing upon Mr. Prentidd’s alleged weakness on the part of the younger Lot and the elder Wetherbee; the action of Mr. Sproxley with the ledger; the subtle will-breaking and spiritual blinding of all the employés in a process that never slept and was operative in every thought and pulse of the establishment--the extent and talent of these, and the untellable blackness of it all, prevailed upon Bellair with the force of a life-impression.