That was a time of heavy pressure of important affairs.  He furiously attacked one task after another, only to abandon each in turn.  His mind, which had always been his obedient, very humble servant, absolutely refused to obey.  He turned everything over to his associates or to subordinates, fighting all morning against the longing to send for her.  At half past twelve he strode out of the office, putting on the air of the big man absorbed in big affairs.  He descended to the street.  But instead of going up town to keep an appointment at a business lunch he hung round the entrance to the opposite building.

She did not appear until one o’clock.  Then out she came—­with the head office boy!—­the good-looking, young head office boy.

Norman’s contempt for himself there reached its lowest ebb.  For his blood boiled with jealousy—­jealousy of his head office boy!—­and about an obscure little typewriter!  He followed the two, keeping to the other side of the street.  Doubtless those who saw and recognized him fancied him deep in thought about some mighty problem of corporate law or policy, as he moved from and to some meeting with the great men who dictated to a nation of ninety millions what they should buy and how much they should pay for it.  He saw the two enter a quick-lunch restaurant—­struggled with a crack-brained impulse to join them—­dragged himself away to his appointment.

He was never too amiable in dealing with his clients, because he had found that, in self-protection, to avoid being misunderstood and largely increasing the difficulties of amicable intercourse, he must keep the feel of iron very near the surface.  That day he was for the first time irascible.  If the business his clients were engaged in had been less perilous and his acute intelligence not indispensable, he would have cost the firm dear.  But in business circles, where every consideration yields to that of material gain, the man with the brain may conduct himself as he pleases—­and usually does so, when he has strength of character.

All afternoon he wrestled with himself to keep away from the office.  He won, but it was the sort of victory that gives the winner the chagrin and despondency of defeat.  At home, late in the afternoon, he found Josephine in the doorway, just leaving.  “You’ll walk home with me—­won’t you?” she said.  And, taken unawares and intimidated by guilt, he could think of no excuse.

Some one—­probably a Frenchman—­has said that there are always in a man’s life three women—­the one on the way out, the one that is, and the one that is to be.  Norman—­ever the industrious trafficker with the feminine that the man of the intense vitality necessary to a great career of action is apt to be—­was by no means new to the situation in which he now found himself.  But never before had the circumstances been so difficult.  Josephine in no way resembled any woman with whom he had been involved; she was the first he had taken