At the Great American Lunch Hour young George Rollins straightened his desk with an assumed air of interest. No one in the office must know that he was in a hurry, for success is a matter of atmosphere, and it is not well to advertise the fact that your mind is separated from your work by a distance of seven hundred miles. Offices are unreasonable.

But, once out of the building, he set his teeth and began to run, glancing now and then at the gay noon of early spring, which filled Times Square and loitered less than twenty feet, it seemed, over the heads of the crowd. The crowd all looked slightly upward and took deep March breaths and the sun dazzled their eyes so that scarcely anyone saw anyone else but only his own reflection on the sky.

George Rollins, whose mind was over seven hundred miles away, thought that the whole outdoors was horrible. He rushed into the subway and for ninety-five blocks bent a frenzied glance on a carcard which showed vividly how he had only one chance in five of keeping his teeth for ten years. At 137th Street he broke off his study of commercial art, left the subway and began to run again, a tireless, anxious run that brought him this time to his home—one room in a high, horrible apartment house in the middle of nowhere.

There it was on the bureau, the letter—in sacred ink, on blessed paper—all over the city people, if they listened, could hear the beating of George Rollins’ heart. He read the commas, the blots, and the thumbsmudges—then he threw himself hopelessly upon his bed.

He was in a mess, one of those deplorable messes which are ordinary incidents in the life of the poor—which follow poverty like birds of prey. The poor go under or go up or go wrong or even go on, somehow, in a way the poor have—but George Rollins was so new to poverty that he thought his case was the only one in the world.