As we went into the immense concert-hall a group of girls were giving an informal concert among themselves.  When lunch is served on the premises with chronographic exactitude, the thirty-five minutes allowed for the meal give an appreciable margin for music and play.  A young woman was just finishing a florid song.  The concert was suspended, and the whole party began to move humbly away at this august incursion.

“Sing it again; do, please!” the departmental chief suggested.  And the florid song was nervously sung again; we applauded, the artiste bowed as on a stage, and the group fled, the thirty-five minutes being doubtless up.  The departmental chief looked at me in silence, content, as much as to say:  “This is how we do business in America.”  And I thought, “Yet another way of getting results!”

But sometimes the creators of the organization, who had provided everything, had been obliged to confess that they had omitted from their designs certain factors of evolution.  Hat-cupboards were a feature of the women’s offices—­delightful specimens of sound cabinetry.  And still, millinery was lying about all over the place, giving it an air of feminine occupation that was extremely exciting to a student on his travels.  The truth was that none of those hats would go into the cupboards.  Fashion had worsted the organization completely.  Departmental chiefs had nothing to do but acquiesce in this startling untidiness.  Either they must wait till the circumference of hats lessened again, or they must tear down the whole structure and rebuild it with due regard to hats.

Finally, we approached the sacred lair and fastness of the president, whose massive portrait I had already seen on several walls.  Spaciousness and magnificence increased.  Ceilings rose in height, marble was softened by the thick pile of carpets.  Mahogany and gold shone more luxuriously.  I was introduced into the vast antechamber of the presidential secretaries, and by the chief of them inducted through polished and gleaming barriers into the presence-chamber itself:  a noble apartment, an apartment surpassing dreams and expectations, conceived and executed in a spirit of majestic prodigality.  The president had not been afraid.  And his costly audacity was splendidly justified of itself.  This man had a sense of the romantic, of the dramatic, of the fit.  And the qualities in him and his etat major which had commanded the success of the entire enterprise were well shown in the brilliant symbolism of that room’s grandiosity....  And there was the president’s portrait again, gorgeously framed.

He came in through another door, an old man of superb physique, and after a little while he was relating to me the early struggles of his company.  “My wife used to say that for ten years she never saw me,” he remarked.

I asked him what his distractions were, now that the strain was over and his ambitions so gloriously achieved.  He replied that occasionally he went for a drive in his automobile.