"That's Mr. Ellinger, the first vice-president. Been everywhere, seen
everything; got a fine education."
In vain did Anthony try to open his mind to the romance of finance; he
could think of Mr. Ellinger only as one of the buyers of the handsome
leather sets of Thackeray, Balzac, Hugo, and Gibbon that lined the walls
of the big bookstores.
Through the damp and uninspiring month of March he was prepared for
salesmanship. Lacking enthusiasm he was capable of viewing the turmoil
and bustle that surrounded him only as a fruitless circumambient
striving toward an incomprehensible goal, tangibly evidenced only by the
rival mansions of Mr. Frick and Mr. Carnegie on Fifth Avenue. That these
portentous vice-presidents and trustees should be actually the fathers
of the "best men" he had known at Harvard seemed to him incongruous.
He ate in an employees' lunch-room up-stairs with an uneasy suspicion
that he was being uplifted, wondering through that first week if the
dozens of young clerks, some of them alert and immaculate, and just out
of college, lived in flamboyant hope of crowding onto that narrow slip
of cardboard before the catastrophic thirties.
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