“But what we love best about him,” Miss Rinderley would say, glancing at the enlarged photograph above his desk, “is the tireless way he helps young men. Always he is at that. I have seen him talk here for an hour--when the most pressing matters of criticism and editorial responsibility called--literally giving himself to some one needing help. Very likely he would miss his train for the country. Poor Mr. Hardburg, he needs his rest so----” The caller would cry in his heart, “What a superb old institution this is!” and cover his own weaknesses and shortcomings in a further sheath of mannerism and appreciation--the entire atmosphere strangely prevailing to help one to stifle rather than to ventilate his real points of view. So the establishment moved. The groups of girls going up and down the back stairs--to count or tie or paste through all their interesting days--counted the heads of their respective departments as their greatest men; spoke of them in awed whispers, in certain cases with maternal affection, and on occasion even with playful intimacy on the part of a few--but always as a master-workman, the best man in the business, who expressed the poorest part of himself in words, and had to be lived with for years adequately to be appreciated and understood. Mr. Nathan Lot, the present head of the firm, was a dreamer. It was Mr. Sproxley who had first told Bellair this, but he heard it frequently afterward, came to recognise it as the accepted initial saying as regarded the Head, just as his impeccable honour was Mr. Sproxley’s and unerring critical instinct Mr. Hardburg’s titular association. Mr. Nathan was the least quarrelsome man anywhere, the quietest and the gentlest--a small bloodless man of fifty, aloof from business; a man who had worn and tested himself so little that you would imagine him destined to live as long again, except for the lugubrious atmospheres around his desk, in the morning especially, the sense of imperfect ventilation, though the partitions were but half-high to the lower floor and there was a thousand feet to draw from. The same was beginning in Jabez, the son, something pent, non-assimilation somewhere. However Jabez wasn’t a dreamer; at least, dreaming had not become his identifying proclivity. He was a head taller than his father with a wide limp mouth and small expressionless brown eyes--twenty-seven, and almost as many times a millionaire. Jabez was richer than his father, who was the direct heir of the House of Lot, but his father’s dreaming had complicated the flow of another huge fortune in the familiar domestic fashion--Jabez being the symbol and centre of the combination; also the future head of the House of Lot and Company--up and down town.