As for the girls in the inner office, Carroll only recognized them there.  Seen on the street, away from the environment, he would simply not have dreamed he had ever seen them.  He knew them only in their frames.  As for the middle-aged man at the book-keeper’s desk, he disturbed him in a way that he would not admit to himself.  He spoke to him rather curtly.  If he could avoid speaking to him he did so.  He had a way of sending directions to the book-keeper by the young man.  The book-keeper, if he also surmised Carroll’s private life, gave no sign, although he had ample time.  He sat at his desk faithfully from eight o’clock until half-past four, but the work which he had to do was somewhat amazing to a mind which stopped to reason.  Sometimes even this man, who understood the world in general as a place to be painfully clambered and tramped and even crawled over, to the accomplishment of the ulterior end of remaining upon it at all, and who paid very little attention to other people’s affairs, except as they directly concerned the tragic pettiness of his own, wondered a little at the nature of the accounts which he faithfully kept.

This book-keeper, whose name was William Allbright, lived in Harlem, so far up that it seemed fairly in the country, and on the second floor of a small, ancient building which, indeed, belonged to the period when Harlem was country and which remained between two modern apartment houses.  The book-keeper had a half-right in a little green backyard, wherein flourished with considerable energy an aged cherry-tree, from which the tenants always fondly hoped for cherries.  The cherries never materialized, but the hope was something.  The book-keeper’s elder sister, who kept house for him, was fond of gazing at the cherry-tree, with its scanty spread of white blossoms, and dreaming of cherries.  She was the fonder because she had almost no dreams left.  It is rather sad that even dreams go, as well as actualities.  However, the sister seemed not to mind so very much.  Very little, except the pleasure which she took in watching the cherry-tree, gave evidence that she lamented anything that she had lost or merely missed in life.  In general she had an air of such utter placidity and acquiescence that it almost amounted to numbness.  The book-keeper at this time of year scratched away every evening with a hoe and trowel in his half of the backyard, where he was making a tiny garden-patch.

The garden represented to him, as the tree did to his sister, his one ladder by which his earthly dreams might climb higher.  One night he came home and there were three green spears of corn piercing the mould, and he fairly chuckled.

“The corn has come up,” said he.

“So it has,” said his sister.

A widow woman and her son, who worked in one of the great retail stores, lived down-stairs in the building.  The young man, rather consequential but interested, strolled out in the backyard and surveyed the corn.  The widow, who was consumptive, thrust her head and shoulders, muffled in a white shawl, out of her kitchen window into the soft spring air.