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your desk. Charles occupied one of the two flat mahogany desks that stood in a sort of no man’s land between the roll-top desks of the officers and the smaller flat-tops of lesser executives and secretaries crowding the floor of the bank outside the cages. A green rug extended from the officers’ desks, forming a neat and restricted zone that just included Charles’s desk and the one beside it which was occupied by Roger Blakesley. Charles could see both their names, Mr. Blakesley and Mr. Gray, in silver letters, and he was pleased to see that he had got there first from the eight-thirty, a minute or two ahead of Roger and Mr. Burton and ahead of everyone else near the windows.
    Mr. Burton’s desk, which had the best light, was opened already and so was that of Mr. Stephen Merry, the oldest vice-president, and so were all the others except one. This was the desk of Arthur Slade, the youngest vicepresident of the Stuyvesant, who had died in a plane accident when returning from the West Coast six months before. The closed desk still gave Charles a curious feeling of incompleteness and a mixed sense of personal gain and loss because he had been more friendly with Arthur Slade than with anyone else in the Stuyvesant—but then you had to die sometime. Once Arthur Slade had sat at Charles’s own place but that was before Mr. Walter Harry, who had been president when Charles had first come to the bank, had died of an embolism and everyone had moved like players on bases—Burton to Harry, Merry to Burton, Slade to the vacant roll-top—and so on down to Charles himself. The Stuyvesant was decorously accustomed to accident and death and now it was moving time again and it was so plain where one of two persons might be moving next that it was embarrassing. Any observing depositor and certainly everyone employed in the bank, right up to the third floor, must have known that either Mr. Blakesley or Mr. Gray would move to Arthur Slade’s desk by the window. Undoubtedly they were making side bets out in back as Charles used to himself when he had first come there from Boston. Undoubtedly the clerks and the secretaries and the watchmen had started some sort of pool.
    Charles pulled back his mahogany chair and sat down, glancing coolly at all the desks in front of him. Miss Marble, his secretary, had already arranged his engagement pad and now she was standing beside him with his morning mail. She reminded him of Nancy as Nancy had looked when he had first known her—a front-office girl, an executive’s private secretary, as neat as a trained nurse, whose private life, like his own, was temporarily erased. In spite of that crowded room, for a few hours he and Miss Marble would be almost alone, dependent on each other in a strange, impersonal, but also an intimate relationship. As soon as he said good morning to Miss Marble, his whole mind set itself into a brisk, efficient pattern.
    â€œThere’s nothing on your calendar,” Miss Marble said, “before the meeting, but Mrs. Whitaker has just called you.”
    â€œYou mean she’s called this morning already?” Charles asked.
    â€œWell, not Mrs. Whitaker,” Miss Marble said, and she smiled sympathetically. “Her companion called. Mrs. Whitaker’s very anxious to speak with you.”
    â€œAll right,” Charles said. “Get her for me in five minutes,” and he picked up the letters.
    Then Roger Blakesley and Anthony Burton came in from the coatroom and Charles nodded at them and smiled. Roger walked to his own desk at once and Miss Fallon, his secretary, was there, but Anthony Burton stopped for a moment. As he did so, it seemed to Charles that the whole bank was watching them and Mr. Burton must have been aware of this too, but he was more used than Charles to being watched. He stood straight, white-headed and smiling, dressed in a pearl-gray double-breasted suit with an expansive, heavy, gray checked