INTO the offices of Lockyer, Sanders, Benchley, Lockyer & Norman, corporation lawyers, there drifted on a December afternoon a girl in search of work at stenography and typewriting. The firm was about the most important and most famous--radical orators often said infamous--in New York. The girl seemed, at a glance, about as unimportant and obscure an atom as the city hid in its vast ferment. She was blonde--tawny hair, fair skin, blue eyes. Aside from this hardly conclusive mark of identity there was nothing positive, nothing definite, about her. She was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither grave nor gay. She gave the impression of a young person of the feminine gender--that, and nothing more. She was plainly dressed, like thousands of other girls, in darkish blue jacket and skirt and white shirt waist. Her boots and gloves were neat, her hair simply and well arranged.
Perhaps in these respects--in neatness and taste--she did excel the average, which is depressingly low. But in a city where more or less strikingly pretty women, bent upon being seen, are as plentiful as the blackberries of Kentucky's July--in New York no one would have given her a second look, this quiet young woman screened in an atmosphere of self-effacement.
She applied to the head clerk. It so happened that need for another typewriter had just arisen. She got a trial, showed enough skill to warrant the modest wage of ten dollars a week; she became part of the office force of twenty or twenty-five young men and women similarly employed. As her lack of skill was compensated by industry and regularity, she would have a job so long as business did not slacken. When it did, she would be among the first to be let go. She shrank into her obscure niche in the great firm, came and went in mouse-like fashion, said little, obtruded herself never, was all but forgotten.
Nothing could have been more commonplace, more trivial than the whole incident. The name of the girl was Hallowell--Miss Hallowell. On the chief clerk's pay roll appeared the additional information that her first name was Dorothea. The head office boy, in one of his occasional spells of "freshness," addressed her as Miss Dottie. She looked at him with a puzzled expression; it presently changed to a slight, sweet smile, and she went about her business. There was no rebuke in her manner, she was far too self-effacing for anything so positive as the mildest rebuke. But the head office boy blushed awkwardly--why he did not know and could not discover, though he often cogitated upon it.
She remained Miss Hallowell.
Opposites suggest each other. The dimmest personality in those offices was the girl whose name imaged to everyone little more than a pencil, notebook, and typewriting machine. The vividest personality was Frederick Norman. In the list of names upon the outer doors of the firm's vast labyrinthine suite, on the seventeenth floor of the Syndicate Building, his name came last--and, in the newest lettering, suggesting recentness of partnership. In age he was the youngest of the partners.
Lockyer was archaic, Sanders an antique; Benchley, actually only about fifty-five, had the air of one born in the grandfather class. Lockyer the son dyed his hair and affected jauntiness, but was in fact not many years younger than Benchley and had the stiffening jerky legs of one paying for a lively youth. Norman was thirty-seven--at the age the Greeks extolled as divine because it means all the best of youth combined with all the best of manhood. Some people thought Norman younger, almost boyish. Those knew him uptown only, where he hid the man of affairs beneath the man of the world-that-amuses-itself. Some people thought he looked, and was, older than the age with which the biographical notices credited him. They knew him down town only--where he dominated by sheer force of intellect and will.
As has been said, the firm ranked among the greatest in New York. It was a trusted counselor in large affairs--commercial, financial, political--in all parts of America, in all parts of the globe, for many of its clients were international traffickers. Yet this young man, this youngest and most recent of the partners, had within the month forced a reorganization of the firm--or, rather, of its profits--on a basis that gave him no less than one half of the whole.
His demand threw his four associates into paroxysms of rage and fear--the fear serving as a wholesome antidote to the rage.
It certainly was infuriating that a youth, admitted to partnership barely three years ago, should thus maltreat his associates. Ingrate was precisely the epithet for him. At least, so they honestly thought, after the quaint human fashion; for, because they had given him the partnership, they looked on themselves as his benefactors, and neglected as unimportant detail the sole and entirely selfish reason for their graciousness. But enraged though these worthy gentlemen were, and eagerly though they longed to treat the "conceited and grasping upstart" as he richly deserved, they accepted his ultimatum. Even the venerable and veneerated Lockyer--than whom a more convinced self-deceiver on the subject of his own virtues never wore white whiskers, black garments, and the other badges of eminent respectability--even old Joseph Lockyer could not twist the acceptance into another manifestation of the benevolence of himself and his associates.
They had to stare the grimacing truth straight in the face; they were yielding because they dared not refuse.
To refuse would mean the departure of Norman with the firm's most profitable business. It costs heavily to live in New York; the families of successful men are extravagant; so conduct unbecoming a gentleman may not there be resented if to resent is to cut down one's income. The time was, as the dignified and nicely honorable Sanders observed, when these and many similar low standards did not prevail in the legal profession.
