When the door hissed behind you, with that little patent pneumatic device, you ceased to be a human being, and began to be--the human machine.

All the vitality you have stored within that pale body you are expected to exhaust here,--you have sold it, don't you remember, for sixty or three hundred pounds a year; you are not expected to have any left over for pleasures.

That will be robbery.

Masters suffer much from peculation indeed in this way; but a machine is in course of invention which shall put an end to this, by the application of which to your heart the task-master will know whether or not you have spent every available heart-beat in his slavery during the day, or whether you are endeavouring, you miserable thief, to steal home with a little remnant of it for your children at night.
This was the theory of the office, as Henry once heard it expressed, with a cynicism more brief and direct from the lips of one of his task-masters; but it must be admitted that in certain respects his experience was extreme.

There are offices which are the ears and eyes of activities absorbingly and even romantically human.