He crossed the width of the desk-rowed floor and entered his office. Immediately on hanging up his hat a profound irritation began scratching inside him. He went to his desk and sat down. As though about to utter a curse, he refused to look either right or left and kept his eyes lowered. A horrible joke had been played upon him, and he was the one who had played it.

Several years ago, in his zeal to serve his employers as they had never before been served, he had conceived of an office with glass walls to be set on one side of the floor. The arrangement was adopted, and from then on he could work at his desk and simply look up to tell at a glance whether the whole floor was in order. When a girl had a question to ask she could no longer leave her desk, make a half-hour detour through the ladies’ room and eventually arrive at his office to ask him a point of information. Now she need only raise her hand and in a moment he would be at her side. The innovation had cured one of the office’s most serious ills. For he had noticed that no sooner had one girl left her desk than another would follow, and by noon the floor was restless with the coming and going of a railroad terminal.

His glass-enclosed office had been a great satisfaction to him. It was the thing he had done here. It had drawn comment from a vice-president some nine years ago. Often during the depression he felt sure that his salary had not been cut only because the higher officials realized that the kind of man who could originate such an idea should not be penalized under any circumstances.

But lately it had become a terrorizing experience to sit in full view of the stenographers. For when he raised his eyes he could see nothing through the glass. At this moment someone might be beckoning to him out there, and getting no response. His days were spent in walking up and down the rows of desks as though on errands of importance, while in feet he was desperately trying to be where he could be summoned by voice.

So he sat behind his desk this morning waiting for a respectable amount of time to elapse before venturing out on the floor on one of his weighty errands. And he knew that the girls were laughing at him for the pretense. But he would go out among them anyway. It was horrible but he would go, for as the weeks passed he felt the ineffable shape of a gigantic blunder forming on this floor. A mistake on the part of certain girls here could mount up until, by the time it had passed through the labyrinthine intestine of the Corporation, it might well explode in a catastrophe that would leave him standing on the sidewalk downstairs, out of a job.

Pretending to study a sheaf of papers on his desk, he was about to rise and head toward the northwest corner of the floor when the phone buzzer vibrated his desk. It was toned down very soft so as not to disturb the girls. He picked up the phone just as though it were quite ordinary for him to receive a call five minutes after he had arrived in the morning. But it was not ordinary and his throat was already closing against the quickening beat of his heart.