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Frances waited for her husband, walking slowly up and down under the row of pallid city maples. She preferred the open light of the Square to the gloom of the street that cut like a canyon between the towering office-buildings on either side of it.

They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings. The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud.

The middle-aged inhabitant who could remember it when it was a corn-field now beheld full-blasted breweries, cinematograph theaters, ten-story office-buildings, old mansions converted into piano-salesrooms and millinery emporiums, business colleges, and more full-blasted breweries up and down its length.

New buildings loomed up working quarters of men who were grubbing for dollars, the new wharves, the skeletons of elevators, sullen, windowless warehouses, the office-buildings of men who were already fighting and quarreling and gripping at one another's throats in the struggle for supremacy, for the biggest and ripest plums in this new land of opportunity.

Tier after tier of lights had begun to prick out in the back-drop of skyscraping office-buildings. The little park, after the six-o'clock stampede, settled back into a sort of lamplit quiet, dark figures, the dregs of a city day, here and there on its benches.

She would meet Chris far down town, among the big, cold, snowbound office-buildings, and they would loiter for two hours at some inconspicuous table in a restaurant, and come wandering out into the cold streets still talking, absorbed and content.

The building in which Killigrew and Company had its offices belonged to Killigrew personally. It had cost him a round million to build, but the office-rentals were making it a fine investment. These ornate office-buildings caused Thomas to marvel unceasingly. In London cubby-holes were sufficient. If merchants like Killigrew, generally these were along the water-front; creaky, old, dim-windowed.

"But I knew it would have to come." "Think of me!" she exclaimed, "going about scolding other people for the way they make their money! When I thought of my own, I had visions of palatial hotels and office-buildings everything splendid and clean!" "Well, my dear, you've learned now, and you will be able to do something "

The business subaltern, charming and gallant as the jungle-gallopers of Kipling, drills files, not of troops, but of correspondence. The artist plays the keys, not of pianos, but of typewriters. Desks, not decks; courts of office-buildings, not of palaces these are the stuff of our latter-day drama.