The partner whom Overholt saw was not ill-natured, and besides, it was near Christmas, and he had been poor himself when he was young.  If Overholt would kindly sign a note at sixty days for the overdraft it would be all right.  The banker was sorry he could not authorise him to overdraw any further, but it was strictly against the rules, an exception had been made because Mr. Overholt was such a well-known man, and so forth.  But the inventor explained that he had not meant to ask any favour, and had come to explain how he had made such a strange mistake.  The banker, like the teller, thought that a man who could not count money must be mad, but was too civil, or too good-natured, to say so.

Overholt signed the note, thanked him warmly, and went away.  He and his old umbrella looked very dejected as he left the building and dived into the stream of men in the street, but if he had paid any attention to his fellow-beings he would have seen here and there a number who looked quite as unhappy as he did.  He had come all the way from the country expressly to explain his error, and had been in the greatest haste to get down town and have the interview over.  To go home with the prospect of trying to eat a dinner that would be cold, and of sitting in his workshop all the afternoon just to stare at his failure until Newton came home, was quite another matter.  If the weather had been less disagreeable he would have gone to the Central Park, to sit in a quiet corner and think matters over.

As that seemed out of the question, he walked from the bank to Forty-Second Street, taking an hour and a half over it.  It was better to go on foot than to sit in a car facing a dozen or twenty strangers, who would wonder why he looked so miserable.  Sensitive people always fancy that everybody is looking at them and criticising them, when in fact no one cares a straw how they look or what they do.

Then, too, he was in such a morbid state of mind about his debt that it looked positively wrong to spend five cents on a car-fare; even the small change in his pocket was not his own, and that, and hundreds of dollars besides, must be paid back in sixty days.  Otherwise he supposed he would be bankrupt, which, to his simple mind, meant disgrace as well as ruin.

It had stopped raining before he reached Grace Church, and as he crossed Madison Square the sun shone out, the wind had veered to the west, and the sky was clearing all round.  The streets had seemed full before, but they were positively choking with people now.  The shops drew them in and blew them out again with much less cash about them, as a Pacific whale swallows water and spouts it out, catching the little fish by thousands with his internal whalebone fishing-net.  But, unlike the fishes, the people were not a whit less pleased.  On the contrary, there was something in the faces of almost all that is only seen once a year in New York, and then only for certain hours; and that is real good-will.  For whatever the most home-loving New Yorker may say of his own great city, good-will to men is not its dominant characteristic, nor peace its most remarkable feature.