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 tile business. Teach Him the meaning of service, hey, Talliaferro?”

“No: really, I—” Mr. Talliaferro objected with alarm. The stranger interrupted again.

“Well, there’s nothing better on God’s green earth than Rotary. Mr. Fairchild had given me to understand that you were a member,” he accused with a recurrence of cold suspicion. Mr. Talliaferro squirmed with unhappy negation. The other stared him down, then he took out his watch. “Well, well. I must run along. I run my day to schedule. You’d be astonished to learn how much time can be saved by cutting off a minute here and a minute there,” he informed them. “And—”

“I beg pardon?”

“What do you do with them?” Fairchild asked.

“When you’ve cut off enough minutes here and there to make up a sizable mess, what do you do with them?”

“—Setting a time limit to everything you do makes a man get more punch into it; makes him take the hills on high, you might say.” A drop of nicotine on the end of the tongue will kill a dog, Fairchild thought, chuckling to himself. He said aloud:

“Our forefathers reduced the process of gaining money to proverbs. But we have beaten them; we have reduced the whole of existence to fetiches.”

“To words of one syllable that look well in large red type,” the Semitic man corrected.

The stranger ignored them. He half turned in his chair. He gestured at the waiter’s back, then he snapped his fingers until he had attracted the waiter’s attention. “Trouble with these small second-rate places,” he told them. “No pep, no efficiency, in handling trade. Check, please,” he directed briskly. The cherubic waiter bent over them.