It was a sketch of a subway interior showing a group of passengers, one of whom’ sat with a big cigar in his mouth. The expressions of his neighbors revealed intense disgust with him, and the caption of the picture was, ‘DON’T SMOKE ON PUBLIC CONVEYANCES. YOU ANNOY OTHER PASSENGERS.’ What captured Mr Newman, however, was a wobbly penciled arrow pointing at the smoker near whose head was scrawled, ‘Jew.’ The tinge of embarrassment that would have disturbed him once did not occur this morning. This mute ‘scene’ – there were several of the brethren standing right under the card – brewed within him instead a small but undeniable tension of power. Even his lifelong horror of bad taste was not called up, for the anonymous scrawler had lost some of his creeping anonymity overnight and resembled Mr Carlson more than a ruffian. He had always feared that some riot would break out and carry him into its vortex willy-nilly, and violence of any kind shook him, but that fear too he could not find this morning. For whatever happened now would find him prepared by Fred beforehand, and if he played a part it would be one that suited his temperament and respectability.

So he smiled, inwardly, at the word that was written above the selfish smoker, and merely thought it apt. And with an air of chieftaincy he turned his eyes among the passengers and found his Jew, and quite omnisciently raised his brows with the pleasing awareness of man’s stupidity – man who could sit so leisurely and calm while his very doom was written on the wall above his head.

The part of the city into which he emerged from the subway was one where several giant corporations had their central administrative offices. Mr Newman, with the morning sun warm upon his back, stood a moment on a corner near Wall Street and surveyed the block. He looked then like any one of thousands of commuters who like to pause a moment on a street corner before entering the skyscrapers in which they gather their substance. He felt a lightness of heart as he strolled staidly into the cool and vaulted lobby of the building where the Akron Corporation had three floors. He rose skyward in the elevator and emerged on floor thirty-three. It surprised him how similar the layout was to that of his old company. He walked up to the young lady at the reception desk. She looked up from a newspaper she was reading and he asked for the personnel manager. He told her his name and business and after waiting some ten minutes was asked into a surprisingly sumptuous leathered office.

He sat in a fine mahogany-backed chair some ten feet from the desk of Mr Stevens, who was not more than thirty-five and was obviously a college man.

‘What can I do for you, sir?’ Mr Stevens asked, and added, ‘You’re from the – Company, are you?’

‘Why no,’ Mr Newman quickly advised him, throwing his head back and smiling down his nose. ‘The girl asked me what I had done and I told her that …’