He hired an office down-town, joined the Commercial Club, religiously attended every meeting that had to do with food conservation, hunted out, absorbed, appropriated all the economic secrets that served his purpose....  Suddenly he found himself engrossed, enthusiastic, busy!  Finally Claire said to him one day: 

“Don’t you think I ought to come to you every afternoon?”

“If you can arrange it,” he almost snapped back at her.

She did arrange it, how he took no pains to inquire, and a little later she said again: 

“You ought to have some one here all day.  I guess you will have to look for another stenographer.”

He remembered how menacingly he had darted at her.  She was dressed for the street, on her way home, and she had halted at the door.

“Do you want to desert the work that you’ve inspired?” he demanded.

“Inspired?...  By me?” Her voice took on a note of triumph.

“You didn’t fancy that I inspired it, did you?” he sneered at her.

His vehemence confused her.  “I hadn’t thought....  Really, you know....  Well, as you say....  But, of course, it is absurd when you can get any number of girls to....”

“But suppose I want you?” he demanded of her for a second time.

She left without further reply.

When she was gone he found himself in a nasty panic.  It was as if the lady who had called him to her lists had suddenly decided upon a new defender.

“Is she tired of it all ... or is there some one else?  Can it be possible that Flint....”

He had stopped short, amazed to find his mind descending to such a vulgar level.  What had come over him?  And he began to fancy things as they once had been—­empty, purposeless days, and nights that found him too bored to even sleep.  It seemed incredible that he could go back to them again.  What lay at the bottom of his sudden deep-breathed satisfaction with life?  For an instant, the truth which he had kept at bay with his old trick of evasion swept toward him.

“No ... no,” he muttered.  “Oh no!...  That would be too absurd!”

But when he had gone to the mirror to brush his hair before venturing on the street he found thick beads of perspiration on his forehead and his hand shook as he lifted the comb.

The next day he told Claire that in the future her salary would be twenty dollars a week.  He stood expecting her to rail against the increase, to try to put him to rout by explaining that she had received less for a full day’s work at Flint’s.  But to his surprise she thanked him and went on with her work.

It was shortly after this that he began to haunt the various performances in which Lily Condor and Claire appeared.  He always contrived to slip in during the first number, which as a rule happened to be Mrs. Condor’s offering, and he sat in a far corner where nobody but that lady could have chanced upon him.  But he never knew her to fail in locating him, or to miss the opportunity to sit out the remainder of the program at his side, or to suggest crab-legs Louis at Tait’s, particularly if Claire were determined upon an early leave-taking.  The effect of all this was not lost upon the general public, and it was not long before men of Stillman’s acquaintance used to remark facetiously to him over the lunch-table: