The offices of the Associated Woolen Mills were on the sixteenth floor of a modern office building in the lower city, which towered above the surrounding squalid brownstone houses given over to pedlers and delicatessen shops like a gleaming stork ankle deep in a pool of murky water. Bojo wandered through long mathematical rooms with mathematical young men perched high on desk stools all with the same mathematical curve of the back, past squadrons of clicking typewriters, clicking endlessly as though each human unit had been surrendered into the cogs of a universal machine. He passed one by one a row of glassed-in rooms with names of minor officers displayed, marking them solemnly as though already he saw the long slow future ahead: Mr. Pelton, treasurer; Mr. Spinny, general secretary; Mr. Colton, second vice-president; Mr. Horton, vice-president; Mr. Rhoemer, general manager, until he arrived at the outer waiting-room with its faded red leather sofas and polished brass spittoons, where he had come first as a boy in need of money. Richardson, an old young man, who walked as though he had never been in a hurry and spoke in a whisper, showed him into the inner office of Jotham B. Crocker, explaining that his father would return presently. Everything was in order; chairs precisely placed, the window shades at the same level, bookcases with filed memoranda, even to the desk, where letters to be read and letters to be signed were arranged in neat packages side by side. On the wall was extended an immense oil painting fifteen feet by ten, of Niagara Falls in frothy eruption, with a large and brilliant rainbow lost in the mist and several figures in the foreground representing the noble Indians gazing with feelings of awe upon the spectacle of nature. Behind the desk hung a large black and white engraving of Abraham Lincoln, with one hand resting on the Proclamation of Emancipation, flanked by smaller portraits of Henry Ward Beecher and the author of the McKinley tariff. Opposite was an old-time family group done in crayons, representing Mr. and Mrs. Crocker standing side by side, with Jack in long trousers and Tom in short, while on the shining desk amid the papers was a daguerrotype mounted in a worn leather frame, of the wife who had been dead fifteen years. Bojo selected a cigar from the visitors box and strode up and down, rehearsing in his mind the arguments he would bring to bear against the expected ultimatum. From the window the lower bay expanded below him with its steam insects crawling across the blue-gray surface, its wharf-crowded shores, beyond the ledges on ledges of factories trailing cotton streamers against the brittle sky. Everywhere the empire of industry extended its stone barracks without loveliness or pomp, smoke-grimed, implacable prisons, where multitudes herded under artificial light that humanity might live in terms of millions.