“Well, you bring your wife in,” he said after a moment of thought, “and I’ll talk to her.” “Sure,” said Adolph. Then he winked in his wise way. “I safe you the commission. What iss there in it for me?” “What?” exclaimed Murray. “I haf a talk with Brown,” explained Adolph. “It’s vorth something to him to get the business, but he don’t make it vorth nothing to me to give it.” “If he did we’d discharge him.” “Sure, sure,” returned the imperturbable Adolph. “We got to watch the boys or there won’t be nothing left for us. So I safe the commission for you. What iss there in it for me?” “Not a damn thing!” “You play it that way with the fool,” advised Adolph complacently. “It’s a bully bluff for the feller that don’t know how things was done in business. Then we go splits, yes?” The ignorance and effrontery of the man so amazed Murray that he forgot his indignation for a moment and undertook to explain. “There is no commission on business that comes to the office,” he said. “Sure!” laughed Adolph, again resorting to that sagacious wink. “You let the company make it, yes? I stay home, you send man to tell me get insured, I say yes, man get paid—ain’t it so? I come here to get insured, and you give that man’s pay to the company, the men vorth millions—oh, yes, sure!” Adolph laughed at the absurdity of the thing. “Iss there anything in my eye?” he asked suddenly. “You sit down there!” ordered Murray, for Adolph was now leaning familiarly over Murray’s desk. “I ought to kick you out, but I’m going to tell you a few things. Sit down and keep still. I’m several sizes bigger than you are and it’s my turn.” Murray spoke so aggressively that Adolph promptly returned to his seat. “Now, to begin with, you make a mistake in judging everybody else by yourself; there are a lot of decent people in this world. A good many may worship the almighty dollar, and that’s bad enough, but God help the few who get down to worshiping the almighty cent. A good many keep a lookout for graft, but you are the first one I ever saw who seemed to think everybody was crooked.” “No, _nein_; only business—” “Keep still! You insult everybody you try to do business with by acting on the assumption that he is in your class. You have absorbed some of the tricky commercialism that is prevalent these days, and you’ve got the idea that there isn’t anything else—not even common sense. You would break the law for a trifle. What you propose is morally wrong, but we won’t discuss that, because you can’t understand it.” “I don’t like—”