e business
from end to end--as his father did--as I do."

"And what good will that do him?" inquired Ross, with fine irony. "You
know it isn't in the manufacturing end that the money's made nowadays. We
can hire hundreds of good men to manufacture for us. I should say he'd be
wiser were he trying to get a _practical_ education."

"Practical!"

"Precisely. Studying how to stab competitors in the back and establish
monopoly. As a manager, he may some day rise to ten or fifteen thousand a
year--unless managers' salaries go down, as it's likely they will. As a
financier, he might rise to--to _our_ class."

Whitney grunted, the frown of his brows and the smile on his sardonic
mouth contradicting each other. He could not but be pleased by the
shrewdness of his son's criticism of his own half-sincere,
half-hypocritical tribute to virtues that were on the wane; but at the
same time he did not like such frank expression of cynical truth from a
son of his. Also, he at the bottom still had some of the squeamishness
that was born into him and trained into him in early youth; he did not
like to be forced squarely to face the fact that real business had been
relegated to the less able or less honest, while the big rewards of
riches and respect were for the sly and stealthy. Enforcing what Ross had
said, there came into his mind the reflection that he himself had just
bribed through the Legislature, for a comparatively trifling sum, a law
that would swell his fortune and income within the next five years more
than would a lifetime of devotion to business.

He would have been irritated far more deeply had he known that Arthur
was as well aware of the change from the old order as was Ross, and that
deliberately and on principle he was refusing to adapt himself to the
new order, the new conditions of "success." When Arthur's manliness
first asserted itself, there was perhaps as much of vanity as of pride
in his acceptance of the consequences of Hiram's will. But to an
intelligent man any environment, except one of inaction or futile
action, soon becomes interesting; the coming of Madelene was all that
was needed to raise his interest to enthusiasm. He soon understood his
fellow-workers as few of them understood themselves. Every human group,
of whatever size or kind, is apt to think its characteristics peculiar
to itself, when in fact they are as universal as human nature, and the
modifications due to the group's environment are ins