“Twenty years,” she said, snapping a rubber band about her note-book.

“And always at this desk?”

“Oh, dear, no.  I came in at nine hundred, and now I am getting twelve hundred.”

“But always in this room?”

She nodded.  “Yes.  And it is very nice.  Most of the people have been here as long as I, and some of them much longer.  There’s Major Orr, for example, he has been here since just after the War.”

“Do you ever feel as if you were serving sentence?”

She laughed.  She was not troubled by a vivid imagination.  “It really isn’t bad for a woman.  There aren’t many places with as short hours and as good pay.”

For a woman?  But for a man?  He turned back to his desk.  What would he be after twenty years of this?  He waked every morning with the day’s routine facing him—­knowing that not once in the eight hours would there be a demand upon his mentality, not once would there be the thrill of real accomplishment.

At noon when he saw Miss Terry strew bird seed on the broad window sill for the sparrows, he likened it to the diversions of a prisoner in his cell.  And, when he ate lunch with a group of fellow clerks in a cheap restaurant across the way, he wondered, as they went back, why they were spared the lockstep.

In this mood he left the office at half-past four, and passing the place where he usually ate, inexpensively, he entered a luxurious up-town hotel.  There he read the papers until half-past six; then dined in a grill room which permitted informal dress.

Coming out later, he met Barry coming in, linked arm in arm with two radiant youths of his own kind and class.  Musketeers of modernity, they found their adventures on the city streets, in cafes and cabarets, instead of in field and forest and on the battle-field.

Barry, with a flower in his buttonhole, welcomed Roger uproariously.  “Here’s Whittington,” he said.  “You ought to hear his poem, fellows, about a little cat.  He had us all hypnotized the other night.”

Roger glanced at him sharply.  His exaggerated manner, the looseness of his phrasing, the flush on his cheeks were in strange contrast to his usual frank, clean boyishness.

“Come on, Poole,” Barry urged, “we’ll motor out in Jerry’s car to the Country Club, and you can give it to us out there—­about Whittington and the little cat.”

Roger declined, and Barry took quick offense.  “Oh, well, if you don’t want to, you needn’t,” he said; “four’s a crowd, anyhow—­come on, fellows.”

Roger, vaguely troubled, watched him until he was lost in the crowd, then sighed and turned his steps homeward.

As Roger ascended to his Tower, the house seemed strangely silent.  Pittiwitz was asleep beside the pot of pink hyacinths.  She sat up, yawned, and welcomed him with a little coaxing note.  When he had settled himself in his big chair, she came and curled in the corner of his arm, and again went to sleep.