He reserved one button for the last--the one farthest to the right upon his glass-topped desk. He knew what pressure upon that button would bring, and he felt a curious shrinking, a timidity, when he reflected upon that fact. He knew he could cause to stand before him a vision of calm, cool and somewhat superior femininity. In a few short months Mr. Rawn had learned to trust, to respect and to dread his assistant, Miss Virginia Delaware. In fact, it occurred to him at this very moment that she might perhaps be one of that half of the other third who can distinguish between pretense and the actual, between shoddy and the valid article.
Yet though this thought gave him a manner of chill, there was with it an attendant thought which caused him to glow with the joy of power. By simply dropping his finger, he, John Rawn, could summon into his presence the figure of a beautiful young woman--a woman not yet grown old and gray; a woman of personal charm; a woman calm, cool and superior. He stretched his own large limbs, glanced at his rugged frame, his somewhat lined face in the glass of the cloak-room door. He looked upon himself and saw that he was good; as God looked upon the world when He made it. He was of belief that a little gray hair at the temples was no such bar after all in a man's appearance.
Rawn had lived a life singularly clean and innocent. His youth had been gawky, his manhood ignorant. But now, somehow, somewhere, deep in some unsuspected corner of his nature, John Rawn felt glowing something heretofore unknown to him. He did not know what it was. At times it seemed to him he could see opening out before him a new world of wide and inviting expanses, a world of warmth and light and luxury and color; in short, a world as unlike Kelly Row as you may well imagine, inhabited by beings wholly different from those obtaining in Kelly Row. And there, among all these, one.... It is to be seen, in fact, that the life of the city began to open before John Rawn. The soul of the city is woman, as it was the soul of Rome. Rawn was learning what hitherto he had small opportunity to learn. At times he leaned back in luxurious realization of the fact that he, John Rawn, late railway clerk, but born to the purple, could by a touch upon this certain plate of mother-of-pearl call before him in reality a vision which sometimes he saw within his mind.