obvious conclusion was, they were not happy with business. There
was some strange wistfulness in the conduct of Big Business Dogs,
he thought. Under the pretence of transacting affairs, they were
really trying to discover something that had eluded them.

The same thing, strangely enough, seemed to be going on in a
sphere of which he knew nothing, the world of art. He gathered
from the papers that writers, painters, musicians, were holding
shindies almost every night, at which delightful rebels, too busy
to occupy themselves with actual creation, talked charmingly
about their plans. Poets were reading poems incessantly,
forgetting to write any. Much of the newspaper comment on
literature made him shudder, for though this was a province quite
strange to him, he had sound instincts. He discerned fatal
ignorance and absurdity between the pompous lines. Yet, in its
own way, it seemed a bold and honest ignorance. Were these, too,
like the wistful executives, seeking where the blue begins?

But what was this strange agitation that forbade his
fellow-creatures from enjoying the one thing that makes
achievement possible--Solitude? He himself, so happy to be left
alone--was no one else like that? And yet this very solitude that
he craved and revelled in was, by a sublime paradox, haunted by
mysterious loneliness. He felt sometimes as though his heart had
been broken off from some great whole, to which it yearned to be
reunited. It felt like a bone that had been buried, which God
would some day dig up. Sometimes, in his caninomorphic conception
of deity, he felt near him the thunder of those mighty paws. In
rare moments of silence he gazed from his office window upon the
sun-gilded, tempting city. Her madness was upon him--her splendid