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clean, his open shirt was fresh, his hair was combed, he was shaved. Later I noticed that his nails were proper. He seemed to have no relation to the room.
    “It’s nice to have a sociable beer once in a while,” he said. “My folks always taught me not to go in for heavy drinking, but this can’t hurt a fellow, now can it?”
    He was obviously from a small town: the talk about the weather, the accent, the politeness were unmistakable signs. The simple small-town boy come to the big city. His body expressedit: less than medium size with a trim build, he suggested the kind of grace which vaults a fence in an easy motion.
    The features were in character. He had straight corn-colored hair with a part to the side, and a cowlick over one temple. His eyes were small and intensely blue and were remarked immediately, for his nose and mouth were without distinction. He was still freckled, which made me wonder at his age. I was to learn later that like myself he was at least in his middle twenties, but there must have been many people who thought him eighteen.
    Standing in the center of the floor, the light reflected from his blond hair, he was in considerable contrast to his room. It seemed wrong for him. I had a picture of the places in which he had slept through his boyhood: a bed, a Bible, and in the corner a baseball bat perhaps. As though in confirmation, the only decoration upon his wall was a phosphorescent cross printed on cardboard. It would glow in the darkness when the lights were out.
    I had the fantasy that each morning he cleaned this room, dusted the woodwork and beat the rug. Then after he was gone, a stranger would enter and make a furious search for something Hollingsworth could not possibly possess. Or else … There was the picture of Hollingsworth making the search himself, ripping open the drawers, hurling clothing to the floor. This was fanciful, and yet the room seemed to be visited more by violence than by sloth.
    After a few minutes I asked him where he worked, and he told me he was a clerk in one of the large brokerage houses in Wall Street.
    “Do you like it?”
    He made a characteristic speech. “Oh, yes, I can’t complain,” he said in his soft voice. “They’re all very nice over there, and they lead one to believe—although of course they may have their reasons for it—that there’s a lot of room for advancement. But Ilike a job like that anyway. It’s clean work, and I always prefer clean work, don’t you?”
    “I haven’t thought about it much.”
    “No? Well, I can see that not everybody thinks about it the way I do.” His politeness was irritating. He added, “I suppose there’s a lot to be said for an outdoor occupation, and the healthful qualities involved.”
    “I’d hate the idea of being cooped up in an office.”
    “Mr. Wilson—he’s the man over me—says there are all kinds of inside jobs, and if you can work with people instead of paper, it’s very different. He’s going to prepare me to be a customer’s man, and that I would like more.”
    “Do you think you’d be good at that?”
    He considered my question seriously. “Yes, I do. I’m very good at selling. My folks have a store in Meridabet—that’s my home town—and I’ve always been able to sell people the things they wanted, and then sometimes the things they didn’t want.” He gave an uncertain smile which voided his last sentence of any humor, and said, “I don’t suppose that’s a very nice way to do business?”
    “It’s a rough life as the man said.”
    He guffawed loudly with a hir-hir-hir that lasted for many seconds. But his laughter lapsed so abruptly that I realized there was no real merriment. He was making just another gesture. “That
is
a clever way of putting it,” he told me. In one of his excursions he had picked up a pipe and a tin of tobacco, and he played a match carefully over the bowl. I could see by the way he held it in his mouth that he found little