The second is that few men possess the power of continuous concentration.  Most of us cannot concentrate at all; any slight distraction suffices to disrupt and destroy the whole train of thought.  A good many can concentrate for a few hours, for a week or so, for two or three months.  But there comes a small achievement and it satisfies, or a small discouragement and it disheartens.  Only to the rare few is given the power to concentrate steadily, year in and year out, through good and evil event or report.

As Norman stepped into his auto to go to the office—­he had ridden a horse in the park before breakfast until its hide was streaked with lather—­the instant he entered his auto, he discharged his mind of everything but the business before him down town—­or, rather, business filled his mind so completely that everything else poured out and away.  A really fine mind—­a perfect or approximately perfect instrument to the purposes of its possessor—­is a marvelous spectacle of order.  It is like a vast public library constantly used by large numbers.  There are alcoves, rows on rows, shelves on shelves, with the exactest system everywhere prevailing, with the attendants moving about in list-bottomed shoes, fulfilling without the least hesitation or mistake the multitude of directions from the central desk.  It is like an admirably drilled army, where there is the nice balance of freedom and discipline that gives mobility without confusion; the divisions, down to files and even units, can be disposed along the line of battle wherever needed, or can be marshaled in reserve for use at the proper moment.  Such a mind may be used for good purpose or bad—­or for mixed purposes, after the usual fashion in human action.  But whatever the service to which it is put, it acts with equal energy and precision.  Character—­that is a thing apart.  The character determines the morality of action; but only the intellect determines the skill of action.

In the offices of that great law firm one of the keenest pleasures of the more intelligent of the staff was watching the workings of Frederick Norman’s mind—­its ease of movement, its quickness and accuracy, its obedience to the code of mental habits he had fixed for himself.  In large part all this was born with the man; but it had been brought to a state of perfection by the most painful labor, by the severest discipline, by years of practice of the sacrifice of small temptations—­temptations to waste time and strength on the little pleasant things which result in such heavy bills—­bills that bankrupt a man in middle life and send him in old age into the deserts of poverty and contempt.

Such an unique and trivial request as that of Josephine Burroughs being wholly out of his mental habit for down town, he forgot it along with everything else having to do with uptown only—­along with Josephine herself, to tell a truth which may pique the woman reader and may be wholly misunderstood by the sentimentalists.  By merest accident he was reminded.