Again the titillating of danger caught Mr Newman. He was about to reply when he looked down and saw the Hindenburg Jew studying him. The man seemed about to get up and push him or something. He turned to Fred.

‘I’ll let you know. I may have to work late Thursday,’ he said quietly, turning his back on the Jew. The train was coming into his station. Fred touched his arm and said OK. The doors opened and Mr Newman quickly stepped onto the platform. Instantly upon facing in the direction of his stairway his body began again to tremble inside. The train pulled away and he walked toward his exit, careful about his distance from the platform edge, and climbed the stairs.

On the sunny sidewalk he stood still for a moment and caught his wind. As he raised his arm to press his Panama more firmly onto his head, a cool drop of sweat fell from his armpit to his ribs. Every day of the past weeks he had halted on this corner, dreading what might await him in the office, and as always during these pauses his skin became creamy in the heat of the sun and his imagining. Walking neatly now, watchfully along the already baking sidewalk, he tried to think of his block and the houses all identical standing there like pickets on a fence. The memory of their sameness soothed his yearning for order, and he walked toward his building judiciously gathering the full force of his wits.

Chapter Three

WITH a few aged exceptions he had hired every one of the seventy girls who worked at the seventy desks on the sixteenth floor of that building.

A block away from it he looked distracted, his lip moving spasmodically as though to find a place of composure on his face. Passing through the Gothic entrance of the Corporation’s skyscraper his lips seemed to die and become still; as the elevator lifted him upward his lips hardened, and when the doors opened and he stepped out onto the sixteenth floor his mouth was set as severely as if he were refusing food.

The transformation was much older than his recent fear. For twenty years and more the mammoth size of the company had forced it upon him. He knew that the company owned a hundred skyscrapers like this, in nearly every state and foreign nation, and the thought of its size had depressed him, had become a weight upon him whenever the possibility arose that he might have to defend himself against it. He had seen other men trying to defend themselves against it, and he had seen them crushed, and so he stepped onto the sixteenth floor with his features set in a mask of responsibility, as though to display to anyone who might be watching that he was already concerned about the morning’s work. It was the face of a pastor moving toward the altar on a high occasion, and the girls at their desks responded by glancing away and hushing as the ceremony was about to begin.