For a moment he had a taste of desire for unspringing power.  If he could but be the wind to shake these dry reeds of custom into a semblance of life!...  One by one they passed him with an air of growing preoccupation ... each step was carrying them nearer to the day’s pallid slavery, and an unconscious sense of their genteel serfdom seemed gradually to settle on them.  There were no bent nor broken nor careworn toilers among this drab mass...the stamp of long service here was a withered, soul-quenched gentility that came of accepting life instead of struggling against it.

Gradually the temper of the crowd communicated itself to him.  It was time to descend from his speculative heights and face the problems of his workday world.  He turned sharply toward his office.  Young Brauer was just mounting the steps.

“Well, what’s new?” Brauer threw out, genially.

“Not a thing in the world!” escaped Starratt.

They went into the office together.

Old Wetherbee was carrying his cash book out of the safe.  The old man smiled.  He was usually in good humor early in the morning.

“Well, what’s new?” he inquired, gayly.

“Not a thing in the world!” they chimed, almost in chorus.

At the rear of the office they slipped on their office coats.  Brauer took a comb from his pocket and began carefully to define the part in his already slick hair.  Starratt went forward.

In the center of the room the chief stenographer stood, putting her formidable array of pencils through the sharpener.  She glanced up at Starratt with a complacent smile.

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Starratt!” she purred, archly.  “What’s new with you?”

“Not a thing in the world,” he answered, ironically, and he began to arrange some memoranda in one of the wire baskets on his desk...  At nine thirty the boy brought him his share of the mail from the back office, and in ten minutes he was deeply absorbed in sorting the “daily reports” from the various agencies.  He worked steadily, interrupted by an occasional phone call, an order from the chief clerk, the arrival and departure of business associates and clients.  Above the hum of subdued office conversation the click of typewriting machines and the incessant buzzing of the desk telephones, he was conscious of hearing the same question repeated with monotonous fidelity: 

“Hello!  What’s new with you?”

And as surely, either through his own lips or the lips of another, the identical reply always came: 

“Not a thing in the world!”

At half past eleven he stopped deliberately and stood for a moment, nervously fingering his tie.  He was thinking about the course of action that he had decided upon in that long, unusual vigil of the night before.  His uncertainty lasted until the remembrance of his wife’s scornful question swept over him: 

“Why aren’t you doing something?...  Everybody else is!”