He put a soda-mint in his mouth, turned a corner and saw, down the street, the four-story brick front of Willing’s Emporium. Was it possible that a human being could hate anything as he hated that sight and not drop dead of it? Before this new phase it had been bad enough, all those years when it had been a stagnant pool of sour, slow intrigue and backbiting, carried on by sour, slow, small-minded people, all playing in their different ways on the small-minded, sick old man at the head of it. Lester had always felt that he would rather die than either join in those intrigues or combat them. This aloofness, added to his real incapacity for business, had left him still nailed to the same high stool in the same office which had received him the day he had first gone in. That first day when, vibrant with the excitement of his engagement to that flame-like girl, he had left his University classes and all his plans for the future and rushed out to find work, any work that would enable him to marry! Well, he had married. That had been only thirteen years ago! The time before it seemed to Lester as remote as the age of Rameses. He had hated the slow régime of the sick, small-minded old man, but he hated still more this new régime which was anything but slow. He detested the very energy and forcefulness with which Jerome Willing was realizing his ideals, because he detested those ideals. Lester felt that he knew what those ideals were, what lay behind those “pep” talks to the employees. Jerome Willing’s notion of being a good business-man was to stalk the women of his region, as a hunter stalks unsuspecting game, to learn how to catch them unawares, and how to play for his own purposes on a weakness of theirs only too tragically exaggerated already, their love for buying things. Jerome Willing’s business ideal, as Lester saw it, was to seize on one of the lower human instincts, the desire for material possessions, to feed it, to inflame it, to stimulate it till it should take on the monstrous proportions of a universal monomania. A city full of women whose daily occupation would be buying things, and things, and more things yet (the things Jerome Willing had to sell, be it understood): that was Jerome Willing’s vision of good business. And to realize this vision he joyfully and zestfully bent all the very considerable powers of his well-developed personality. Lester Knapp, the barely tolerated clerk, hurrying humbly down the street to take up his small drudging task, gazed at that life-purpose as he had gazed at the lurid baleful energy of the coal-flames half an hour before.