her man in the
business could in a week. Naturally so. For he was braced, and propped,
and toned up, and his eyes had been opened, and his brain cleared, till
outside of very big business, indeed, few men were on a footing with
him.

In fact, it was business itself which had compelled Mr. Rasselyer-Brown
to drink. It is all very well for a junior clerk on twenty dollars a
week to do his work on sandwiches and malted milk. In big business it
is not possible. When a man begins to rise in business, as Mr.
Rasselyer-Brown had begun twenty-five years ago, he finds that if he
wants to succeed he must cut malted milk clear out. In any position of
responsibility a man has got to drink. No really big deal can be put
through without it. If two keen men, sharp as flint, get together to
make a deal in which each intends to outdo the other, the only way to
succeed is for them to adjourn to some such place as the luncheon-room
of the Mausoleum Club and both get partially drunk. This is what is
called the personal element in business. And, beside it, plodding
industry is nowhere.

Most of all do these principles hold true in such manly out-of-door
enterprises as the forest and timber business, where one deals
constantly with chief rangers, and pathfinders, and wood-stalkers,
whose very names seem to suggest a horn of whiskey under a hemlock tree.

But--let it be repeated and carefully understood--there was no excess
about Mr. Rasselyer-Brown's drinking. Indeed, whatever he might be
compelled to take during the day, and at the Mausoleum Club in the
evening, after his return from his club at night Mr. Rasselyer-Brown
made it a fixed rule to take nothing. He might, perhaps, as he passed
into the house, step into the dining-room and take a very small drink
at the sideboard. But this he counted as part of the return itself, and
not after it. And he might, if his brain were over-fatigued, drop down
later in the night in his pajamas and dressing-gown when the house was
quiet, and compose his mind with a brandy and water, or something
suitable to the stillness of the hour. But this was not really a drink.
Mr. Rasselyer-Brown called it a _nip_; and of course any man may need a
_nip_ at a time when he would scorn a drink.

* * * * *

But after all, a woman may find herself again in her daughter. There,
at least, is consolation. For, as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself
admitted, her daughter, Dulphemia, was herself again. T