Mr. Prutt believed in training his young men in all branches of banking, and Neil, even now, was shifted about from “contacting prospects” and the nursing of old customers through overdrafts to book-work, to signing cashier-checks, and the transfer of funds, and Prutt kept him familiar with the depositors by having him sit in as teller for an hour or two every day.

He was as much in favor with the cashier, S. Ashiel Denver, who was a neighbor in Sylvan Park, as he was with Mr. Prutt.

There were eight banks in Grand Republic, of which the largest was the Blue Ox National: Norton Trock, president, Boone Havock, chairman of the board, Curtiss Havock, general nuisance. But Mr. Prutt considered that institution and its twelve-story building merely utilitarian. He felt that the Second National (there was no First) was in the true Morgan or Tellson’s tradition. In its two-story marble temple, with massive bronze gates, at Chippewa Avenue and Sibley Street, there were no offices to rent, and it did not house alien chiropractors and machinery-agents.

In the banking-room, under the arched ecclesiastic vastness of its ceiling, which was upheld by ponderous pillars of green Italian marble, upon the glossy sea-shining floor of black marble inlaid with squares and diamonds of polished granite and pink quartz, where there was lacking only a robed choir of High-Church bookkeepers to complete the spell of sanctity and of solvency, Neil considered himself a minor canon.

Actually, he was another schoolboy in a row of schoolboy desks.

For all its slanted brass name-plate and its onyx combination clock-inkstand-calendar-thermometer-barometer, his was a small desk, a leg-cramping desk, and his only personal treasures were the silver-framed photograph of Vestal and Biddy, his pipe and tobacco pouch, a copy of True Detective Stories, and a begging letter from his alumni secretary.

* * * * *

If Neil had any singular virtue, it was his loyalty to his friends.

He was thinking that at Christmas most of the dozen or so men whom he called his “close friends” would still be in peril abroad, his three intimates, Eliot and Judd and Rod, among them.

Eliot Hansen, the flashing, the dance-mad, the party-giver, was the inheritor from his plain Norwegian father of the Sweet Scent Dairy and Ice Cream Company, of which the symbol, to be seen on billboards along every highway into Grand Republic, was a pot of honey and a penny-piece.

Judd Browler, the sturdy, the careful, son of Duncan Browler who was the first vice-president of Wargate’s, had sold prunes and biscuits in carload lots before the war.

The great man in that gallery was Rodney Aldwick.

Five years older than Neil, Princeton cum Harvard law-school, now a well-decorated major in the tank corps, Rod Aldwick was the Great Gentleman, the High Adventurer. He was a polo-player, he was a ski-stunter, he was a quick-memorizing genius who had only to look at a page of print to know it. He had the standard Anglo-Prussian specifications for a hero: crisp hair, broad shoulders, slim waist, and 6′ 2″. Major Aldwick would never seduce any woman in the limbo between countess and chambermaid, and if he had had slaves, he would have hacked them to death, but he would never have nagged them. Probably he will some day be found dead in bed, not necessarily his own bed, with either a dagger in his lungs or a laurel-wreath, slightly twisted, on his fine white brow.