Perhaps he was still in preparation. We have not really completed the circle of any accomplishment until we have put it in action. Certainly Bellair had not done that, since the Unknowable ended. He had made no great friends among men or women; though almost thirty, he had met no stirring love affair, at least in this period. He had done the most common duties of trade, for a common reward in cash; lived in a common house--moved in crowds of common men and affairs. It was as if he were a spy, trained from a child, but commanded at the very beginning of his manhood, not only to toil and serve in an insignificant post--but to be insignificant as well. It was by accident, for instance, that they discovered at Lot & Company’s that Bellair was schooled in the Sanscrit. Before usual he was astir that Monday morning, but late at the office for all that. A drop of consciousness somewhere between shoe-buttons, and a similar trance between collar and tie. In these lapses a half hour was lost, and queerly enough afterward the old purports of his life did not hold together as before. A new breath from somewhere, a difference in vitality, and the hum-drum, worn-sore consciousness given to his work with Lot & Company, had become like an obscene relative, to be rid of, even at the price of dollars and the established order of things. It had been very clear as he drank his coffee that he must give quit-notice at the office, yet when he reached there, this was not so easy, and he was presently at work as usual in his cage with Mr. Sproxley, the cashier. The Quaker firm of Lot & Company was essentially a printing establishment. During the first half of the period in which Bellair had been connected, though he was not stupider than usual, he had not realised the crooked weave of the entire inner fabric of the house. Lot & Company had been established for seventy-five years and through three generations. Its conduct was ordered now like a process of nature, a systematised tone to each surface manner and expression. All the departments were strained and deformed to meet and adjust in the larger current of profit which the cashier had somehow bridged without scandal for twenty-seven years. Personally, so far as Bellair knew, Mr. Sproxley was an honest man, though not exactly of the manner, and underpaid. The cashier’s eyes were black, a black that would burn you, and unquestionably furtive, although Bellair sat for two years at a little distance from the cashier’s desk before he accepted the furtiveness, so deeply laid and set and hardened were his first impressions. They were hard eyes as well, like that anthracite which retains its gleaming black edge, though the side to the draft is red to the core.