A week ago he had invented a system of leaving his cigar-case
and cigarette-box in an unused drawer at the bottom of the
correspondence-file, in the outer office. "I'll just naturally be
ashamed to go poking in there all day long, making a fool of myself
before my own employees!" he reasoned. By the end of three days he was
trained to leave his desk, walk to the file, take out and light a cigar,
without knowing that he was doing it.

This morning it was revealed to him that it had been too easy to open
the file. Lock it, that was the thing! Inspired, he rushed out and
locked up his cigars, his cigarettes, and even his box of safety
matches; and the key to the file drawer he hid in his desk. But the
crusading passion of it made him so tobacco-hungry that he immediately
recovered the key, walked with forbidding dignity to the file, took out
a cigar and a match--"but only one match; if ole cigar goes out, it'll
by golly have to stay out!" Later, when the cigar did go out, he took
one more match from the file, and when a buyer and a seller came in for
a conference at eleven-thirty, naturally he had to offer them cigars.
His conscience protested, "Why, you're smoking with them!" but he
bullied it, "Oh, shut up! I'm busy now. Of course by-and-by--" There was
no by-and-by, yet his belief that he had crushed the unclean habit made
him feel noble and very happy. When he called up Paul Riesling he was,
in his moral splendor, unusually eager.

He was fonder of Paul Riesling than of any one on earth except himself
and his daughter Tinka. They had been classmates, roommates, in the
State University, but always he thought of Paul Riesling, with his dark
slimness, his precisely parted hair, his nose-glasses, his hesitant
speech, his moodiness, his love of music, as a younger brother, to be