Bob did his best because he was a true sportsman, and he had entered the game, but he did not like it, and the slow, sleepy monotony of the office, with its trivial tasks which he did not understand, filled him with an immense and cloying languor.  The firm seemed to be dying of the sleeping sickness.  Nothing ever happened.  They filed their interminable statistics, and consulted their interminable books, and marked squares off their interminable maps, and droned along their monotonous, unimportant life in the same manner day after day.  Bob was used to out-of-doors, used to exercise, used to the animation of free human intercourse.  He watched the clock in spite of himself.  He made mistakes out of sheer weariness of spirit, and in the footing of the long columns of figures he could not summon to his assistance the slow, painstaking enthusiasm for accuracy which is the sole salvation of those who would get the answer.  He was not that sort of chap.

But he was not a quitter, either.  This was life.  He tried conscientiously to do his best in it.  Other men did; so could he.

The winter moved on somnolently.  He knew he was not making a success.  Harvey was inscrutable, taciturn, not to be approached.  Fox seemed to have forgotten his official existence, although he was hearty enough in his morning greetings to the young man.  The young bookkeeper, Archie, was more friendly, but even he was a being apart, alien, one of the strangely accurate machines for the putting down and docketing of these innumerable and unimportant figures.  He would have liked to know and understand Bob, just as the latter would have liked to know and understand him, but they were separated by a wide gulf in which whirled the nothingnesses of training and temperament.  However, Archie often pointed out mistakes to Bob before the sardonic Harvey discovered them.  Harvey never said anything.  He merely made a blue pencil mark in the margin, and handed the document back.  But the weariness of his smile!

One day Bob was sent to the bank.  His business there was that of an errand boy.  Discovering it to be sleeting, he returned for his overcoat.  Harvey was standing rigid in the door of the inner office, talking to Fox.

“He has an ingrained inaccuracy.  He will never do for business,” Bob caught.

Archie looked at him pityingly.

III

The winter wore away.  Bob dragged himself out of bed every morning at half-past six, hurried through a breakfast, caught a car—­and hoped that the bridge would be closed.  Otherwise he would be late at the office, which would earn him Harvey’s marked disapproval.  Bob could not see that it mattered much whether he was late or not.  Generally he had nothing whatever to do for an hour or so.  At noon he ate disconsolately at a cheap saloon restaurant.  At five he was free to go out among his own kind—­with always the thought before him of the alarm clock the following morning.