An old way of starting a story

Once upon a time an engineer was a tall man in a company of other tall men, his men. His skin was blistering with sweat and his eyes were full of passion for his job, even better - his Mission. He would certainly have had bright red moustache or at the very least a beard of a matching color, and he would tell his men where to set the dynamite or which way to lay the steel bars. He would be the one to build the Panam canal, the Eiffel tower, the Waterloo bridge and other wonders of the modern world.

Something happened. At some point something terrible had shaken the foundations of this brave new world, now outdated and antique. And that something has turned the Engineer into a night creature that fears light and hides behind a huge block of plastic and glass... Perhaps it was Nobel with his hypocritical and arrogant will that had set the world of science onto a rat race or may be it was Hitler. It is not clear at this point, but something must have changed in the very basics of this world of ours to make it so peculiarly irrational and alien.

I suppose James felt the same way, when he decided to become a butler.

By sartoris here