Nothing could have been more commonplace, more trivial than the whole incident.  The name of the girl was Hallowell—­Miss Hallowell.  On the chief clerk’s pay roll appeared the additional information that her first name was Dorothea.  The head office boy, in one of his occasional spells of “freshness,” addressed her as Miss Dottie.  She looked at him with a puzzled expression; it presently changed to a slight, sweet smile, and she went about her business.  There was no rebuke in her manner, she was far too self-effacing for anything so positive as the mildest rebuke.  But the head office boy blushed awkwardly—­why he did not know and could not discover, though he often cogitated upon it.  She remained Miss Hallowell.

Opposites suggest each other.  The dimmest personality in those offices was the girl whose name imaged to everyone little more than a pencil, notebook, and typewriting machine.  The vividest personality was Frederick Norman.  In the list of names upon the outer doors of the firm’s vast labyrinthine suite, on the seventeenth floor of the Syndicate Building, his name came last—­and, in the newest lettering, suggesting recentness of partnership.  In age he was the youngest of the partners.  Lockyer was archaic, Sanders an antique; Benchley, actually only about fifty-five, had the air of one born in the grandfather class.  Lockyer the son dyed his hair and affected jauntiness, but was in fact not many years younger than Benchley and had the stiffening jerky legs of one paying for a lively youth.  Norman was thirty-seven—­at the age the Greeks extolled as divine because it means all the best of youth combined with all the best of manhood.  Some people thought Norman younger, almost boyish.  Those knew him uptown only, where he hid the man of affairs beneath the man of the world-that-amuses-itself.  Some people thought he looked, and was, older than the age with which the biographical notices credited him.  They knew him down town only—­where he dominated by sheer force of intellect and will.

As has been said, the firm ranked among the greatest in New York.  It was a trusted counselor in large affairs—­commercial, financial, political—­in all parts of America, in all parts of the globe, for many of its clients were international traffickers.  Yet this young man, this youngest and most recent of the partners, had within the month forced a reorganization of the firm—­or, rather, of its profits—­on a basis that gave him no less than one half of the whole.

His demand threw his four associates into paroxysms of rage and fear—­the fear serving as a wholesome antidote to the rage.