This is a wholesale-paper house, and the three partners who run it call themselves, with unconscious irony, “wholesale-paper MEN”! They live their lives in wholesale-paper,—they talk it—they dream it—they plan it—they have no hope in the world except to find people to buy wholesale-paper! And the manager—keen and hungry—he is planning to be a wholesale-paper man himself. And here are twenty-five men and youths apparently having but one virtue in the world, the possibility of consecrating their souls to wholesale-paper!
What they make is useful, it may even be sublime—in which way the business is unique. But none of these men ever thinks of that—they would be just as absorbed in the business if it were wholesale bonnets. None of them has the least care in the world about books. And these men who come here to buy the paper—are they any better? Or is their interest in the paper the profits it may bring to them?
—Dear God!—That brought me back to The Captive.
—I have been sick to-day, and sickness clips your wings. It is an error of mine—I pay for my food with my soul, and so I try to eat little, and thereby make myself ill.
August 3d.
I got my first twelve dollars to-day!