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But this was too easy to last. Human affairs never run smoothly; it is a man’s ability to surmount the hummocks and the pressure ridges that enables him to penetrate to the polar regions of success. The first inkling of disaster came to Mitchell when Miss Dunlap began to tire of the gay life and chose to spend her Monday evenings at home, where they might be alone together. She spoke of the domestic habits she had acquired during her brief matrimonial experience; she boldly declared that marriage was the ideal state for any man, and that two could live as cheaply as one, although personally she saw no reason why a girl should quit work the instant she became a wife, did he? She confessed that Monday evenings had become so pleasant that if Louis could arrange to drop in on Fridays also, the week would be considerably brightened thereby and her whole disposition improved. Now Fridays were cinched tightly to the Big Four, but the young man dared not acknowledge it, so he confessed that all his evenings except Monday were taken up with night school, whereupon Miss Dunlap, in order to keep abreast of his mental development, decided to take a correspondence course in Esperanto.

It transpired also that his attentions toward the Lackawanna had been misconstrued, for one night when Phoebe bade him adieu in the vestibule she broke down and wept upon his shoulder, saying that his coldness hurt her. She confessed that a rate clerk in the freight department wanted to marry her, and she supposed she’d have to accept his dastardly proposal because a girl couldn’t go on working all her life, could she? Then Miss Gratz, of the C. & E.I., following a red-letter night at Grand Opera, succeeded by a German pancake and a stein at the Edelweiss and a cab-ride home, took Louis gravely to task for his extravagance and hinted that he ought to have a permanent manager who took an interest in him, one who loved music as he did and whose tastes were simple and Teutonic.

When the literary lady of the Northwestern declined a trip to the White City and began to read Marion Crawford aloud to him Louis awoke to the gravity of the situation.

But before he had worked the matter out in his own mind that rate clerk of whom Miss Lackawanna had spoken dropped in at Comer & Mathison’s, introduced himself to Mitchell and told him, with a degree of firmness which could not be ignored, that his attentions to Miss Phoebe Snow were distasteful. He did not state to whom. Louis’s caller had the physical proportions of a “white hope,” and he wasted few words. He had come to nail up a vacate notice, and he announced simply but firmly that Miss Snow’s Wednesday evenings were to be considered open time thereafter, and if Mitchell elected to horn his way in it was a hundred-to-one shot that he’d have to give up solid foods for a month or more and take his nourishment through a glass tube.

Nor were the young man’s troubles confined to the office. Miss Harris, it seemed, had seen him with a different lady each night she and Mr. Gross had been out, and had drawn her own conclusions, so, therefore, when he tried to talk to her she flared up and called him a dissipated roue, and threatened to have the head bookkeeper give him a thrashing if he dared to accost her again.

Now the various apartments where Mitchell had been calling, these past months, were opulently furnished with gifts from the representatives of the various railway supply houses of the city, each article being cunningly designed to cement in the mind of the owner a source of supply which, coupled with price and delivery, would make for good sales service. He was greatly surprised one day to receive a brass library lamp from the Santa Fe the initial destination of which had evidently been changed. Then came a mission hall-clock in the original package, redirected in the hand of Miss Gratz, of the C. & E.I., and one day the office-boy from the Lackawanna brought him a smoking-set for which Miss Phoebe Snow had no use. Gifts like these piled up rapidly, many of them bearing witness to the fact that their consignment originated from Mitchell’s very rivals in the railroad trade. Judging from the quantity of stuff that ricocheted from the Santa Fe it was Miss Dunlap’s evident desire to present him with a whole housekeeping equipment as quickly as possible. Louis’s desk became loaded with ornaments, his room at Mrs. Green’s became filled with nearly Wedgwood vases, candlesticks, and other bric-a-brac. He acquired six mission hall-clocks, a row of taborets stood outside of his door like Turkish sentinels, and his collection of ash-receivers was the best in Chicago.