five P.M.
I guess all the other offices must have shut up , for Herman never gave me anything he did n't have to . He banged on the door , and I let him in , and the risk was all right and we were wide open , and I took his ten thousand ... . And about twenty minutes later , as I stood on the front deck of the Wall Street ferryboat crossing the river , the flames burst out of the roof of that warehouse , and we paid nine thousand two hundred and thirty-seven dollars for that coffee ... . This office closes at five P.M. '' This was his superstition , and he lived up to it with absolute consistency . His one grievance was not quite so deep , which probably explained his lesser insistence upon it . This grievance was simply that the conservative policy of the company would not let him accept more than a fraction of what he would have wished to write on the island of Manhattan . Like all men who constantly live in the presence of a peril and grow thus to minimize it , Mr. Cuyler had grown to think and to feel that New York , _ his _ New York , could never have a serious , sweeping fire , a conflagration .