MANY men, possibly a majority, have sufficient equipment for at least a fair measure of success. Yet all but a few are downright failures, passing their lives in helpless dependence, glad to sell themselves for a small part of the value they create. For this there are two main reasons. The first is, as Norman said, that only a few men have the self-restraint to resist the temptings of a small pleasure to-day in order to gain a larger to-morrow or next day. The second is that few men possess the power of continuous concentration.
Most of us cannot concentrate at all; any slight distraction suffices to disrupt and destroy the whole train of thought. A good many can concentrate for a few hours, for a week or so, for two or three months. But there comes a small achievement and it satisfies, or a small discouragement and it disheartens. Only to the rare few is given the power to concentrate steadily, year in and year out, through good and evil event or report.
As Norman stepped into his auto to go to the office --he had ridden a horse in the park before breakfast until its hide was streaked with lather--the instant he entered his auto, he discharged his mind of everything but the business before him down town--or, rather, business filled his mind so completely that everything else poured out and away. A really fine mind--a perfect or approximately perfect instrument to the purposes of its possessor--is a marvelous spectacle of order. It is like a vast public library constantly used by large numbers. There are alcoves, rows on rows, shelves on shelves, with the exactest system everywhere prevailing, with the attendants moving about in list-bottomed shoes, fulfilling without the least hesitation or mistake the multitude of directions from the central desk. It is like an admirably drilled army, where there is the nice balance of freedom and discipline that gives mobility without confusion; the divisions, down to files and even units, can be disposed along the line of battle wherever needed, or can be marshaled in reserve for use at the proper moment. Such a mind may be used for good purpose or bad--or for mixed purposes, after the usual fashion in human action. But whatever the service to which it is put, it acts with equal energy and precision.
Character--that is a thing apart. The character determines the morality of action; but only the intellect determines the skill of action.
In the offices of that great law firm one of the keenest pleasures of the more intelligent of the staff was watching the workings of Frederick Norman's mind--its ease of movement, its quickness and accuracy, its obedience to the code of mental habits he had fixed for himself. In large part all this was born with the man; but it had been brought to a state of perfection by the most painful labor, by the severest discipline, by years of practice of the sacrifice of small temptations--temptations to waste time and strength on the little pleasant things which result in such heavy bills--bills that bankrupt a man in middle life and send him in old age into the deserts of poverty and contempt.
Such an unique and trivial request as that of Josephine Burroughs being wholly out of his mental habit for down town, he forgot it along with everything else having to do with uptown only--along with Josephine herself, to tell a truth which may pique the woman reader and may be wholly misunderstood by the sentimentalists. By merest accident he was reminded.
As the door of his private office opened to admit an important client he happened to glance up. And between the edge of the door frame and his client's automobile-fattened and carefully dressed body, he caught a glimpse of the "poor little forlornness" who chanced to be crossing the outer office. A glint of sunlight on her hair changed it from lifelessness to golden vital vividness; the same chance sunbeam touched her pale skin with a soft yellow radiation--and her profile was delicately fine and regular. Thus Norman, who ob-served everything, saw a head of finely wrought gold--a startling cameo against the dead white of office wall.
It was only with the second thought that he recognized her. The episode of the night before came back and Josephine's penitent yet persistent note.
He glanced at the clock. Said the client in the amusing tone of one who would like to take offense if he only dared, "I'll not detain you long, Mr. Norman.
And really the matter is extremely important."
There are not many lawyers, even of the first rank, with whom their big clients reverse the attitude of servant and master. Norman might well have been flattered.
In that restrained tone from one used to servility and fond of it and easily miffed by lack of it was the whole story of Norman's long battle and splendid victory.
But he was not in the mood to be flattered; he was thinking of other things. And it presently annoyed him that his usually docile mind refused to obey his will's order to concentrate on the client and the business--said business being one of those huge schemes through which a big monster of a corporation is constructed by lawyers out of materials supplied by great capitalists and controllers of capital, is set to eating in enormous meals the substance of the people; at some obscure point in all the principal veins small but leechlike parasite corporations are attached, industriously to suck away the surplus blood so that the owners of the beast may say, "It is eating almost nothing. See how lean it is, poor thing! Why, the bones fairly poke through its meager hide."
