ty fast,--the truth is that Perry
and I have been worried about you for some time. We've tried not to be
too serious in showing it, but we've felt that these modern business
methods were getting into your system without your realizing it. There
are some things a man's friends can tell him, and it's their duty to tell
him. Good God, haven't you got enough, Hugh,--enough success and enough
money, without going into a thing like this Riverside scheme?"

I was intensely annoyed, if not angry; and I hesitated a moment to calm
myself.

"Tom, you don't understand my position," I said. "I'm willing to discuss
it with you, now that you've opened up the subject. Perry's been talking
to you, I can see that. I think Perry's got queer ideas,--to be plain
with you, and they're getting queerer."

He sat down again while, with what I deemed a rather exemplary patience,
I went over the arguments in favour of my position; and as I talked, it
clarified in my own mind. It was impossible to apply to business an
individual code of ethics,--even to Perry's business, to Tom's business:
the two were incompatible, and the sooner one recognized that the better:
the whole structure of business was built up on natural, as opposed to
ethical law. We had arrived at an era of frankness--that was the
truth--and the sooner we faced this truth the better for our peace of
mind. Much as we might deplore the political system that had grown up, we
had to acknowledge, if we were consistent, that it was the base on which
our prosperity was built. I was rather proud of having evolved this
argument; it fortified my own peace of mind, which had been disturbed by
Tom's attitude. I began to pity him. He had not been very successful in
life, and with the little he earned, added to Susan's income, I knew that
a certain ingenuity was required to make both ends meet. He sat listening
with a troubled look. A passing phase of feeling clouded for a brief
moment my confidence when there arose in my mind an unbidden memory of my
youth, of my father. He, too, had mistrusted my ingenuity. I recalled how
I had out-manoeuvred him and gone to college; I remembered the March day
so long ago, when Tom and I had stood on the corner debating how to
deceive him, and it was I who had suggested the nice distinction between
a boat and a raft. Well, my father's illogical attitude towards boyhood
nature, towards human nature, had forced me into that lie, just as the
senseless attitude o