as they had been nor was Mr. Crittenden, whose specialty was the selling-end of Eastern and foreign lumber markets. Even the "young Mr. Gates" was now over fifty. They were all mortal, the health of the "young Mr. Gates" was far from good; and furthermore the business kept steadily growing so that it was very inconvenient to have to wait to consult men widely separated. "Do you get it?" asked Neale, lying in the sun on the Palisades, smoking, looking up at a sweet, well-beloved face and delighting in her eager, intelligent interest in his story. "Do you get it? Half the bunch thought a card-catalogue the foolishest, new-fangled waste of time; half of them didn't know whether it was or not; all of them wanted some sort of tabulation of inside information, and none of them knew how to go about it any more than if they'd been asked to bake a batch of bread or write a theme on the Crusades. The half that wanted to stick to the old ways and keep it all safe under different people's hats were dead set against spending any money on any fool system of collecting and classifying information. And the other half weren't by any means so sure of their ground that they wanted to spend a lot of cash to get an expert. And, anyhow, where could you find an expert? If you let one of those 'business-system' people inside the office he'd be trying to run the whole works. Maybe the idea was all right, but you couldn't get it executed. Well, while the whole proposition was up in the air, and everybody chewing the rag about it, somebody knocks at the door, and who is it? Why, Crittenden's son, just out of college, wanting a job. All nonsense, college, and yet what _would_ it have taught a boy if not how to straighten out and classify information? Anyhow you could get him for next to nothing: boys out of college never expect to be paid anything to speak of, and a good reason why; because they aren't worth anything. Give him a year's try at it! Crittenden's son ought to have a _little_ natural sense. It won't cost much; he can't do any harm; maybe he might work out a system that would be useful. "So they offered the job at slightly more than office-boy wages to the college graduate. And what did _he_ think about it? How had he been trained for such work? _You_ know, Martha, how he'd been trained. What he knew about orderly arrangement of information was about what would go on the head of a pin! He'd been learning a _few_ scattered items about English Literature and Greek Philosophy, and the latest inaccuracy about atoms; and a whole lot about how to get a football over a given line under given conditions. But incidentally and on the side, he'd had a pretty thorough course in poker, and a poker-face was the necessary equipment for _that_ situation!" He and Martha laughed, a light-hearted young laugh, that did them good and made them feel closer than ever to each other in the conspiracy of two against the world.