Vance had suggested the appointment the evening before; for, as he explained to me, he wished to be present in case Leander Pfyfe should arrive from Long Island. “It amuses me tremendously,” he had said, “the way human beings delib’rately complicate the most ordin’ry issues. They have a downright horror of anything simple and direct. The whole modern commercial system is nothing but a colossal mechanism for doing things in the most involved and roundabout way. If one makes a recent purchase at a department store nowadays, a complete history of the transaction is written out in triplicate, checked by a dozen floor-walkers and clerks, signed and countersigned, entered into innum’rable ledgers with various coloured inks, and then elab’rately secreted in steel filing cabinets. And not content with all this superfluous chinoiserie, our business men have created a large and expensive army of efficiency experts whose sole duty is to complicate and befuddle this system still further….
