Against all these departures Johnathan fought tooth and claw,—all but the procuring of new money. The size to which his thumb-nail business had grown began to frighten him. More and more he wanted to “go into conference.” But Nathan, the load of the organization on his enthusiastic young shoulders, formed the habit of humorously responding, “I’m too busy doing things to talk about them!” That angered Johnathan. It pushed him back into a slough of self-pity, outraged dignity and mocked parental authority. All but the procuring of new capital, I say. It was a vast responsibility, being accountable for new capital. It also worried Johnathan mightily. But it was nevertheless a pleasant sort of worry. He inflated in his own esteem. He walked about Paris as a Somebody. He gave less and less time to the “practical” affairs of the company. He no longer “paid off personally” on Saturday afternoons. Instead, he appeared for the first time in tailored clothes, kept banker’s hours and saw himself as a Capitalist. A stenographer had long ago been hired to ameliorate the time-consuming process of punching out correspondence with one finger on the old blind calligraph. Johnathan had a bell installed in a “private” office to push when he wanted this girl. He pushed it on an average of twice an hour. He wrote letters soliciting business from firms too far away to permit of freight rates leaving any profit. He answered advertisements for catalogs in the back of _System Magazine_ and _The Modern Factory_. Of course important letters about supplies and shipments which Nathan had dictated hurriedly during noon hour, were sidetracked for these dictations by Johnathan. Wasn’t he president and treasurer? Frequently, he made a “tour of inspection” through his factory, especially after the addition was built, the principal feature of these trips being to criticize methods which Nathan had instigated, pick up bits of cardboard and string from the floor on the contention that the only way to get rich is to watch the waste boxes, and left a long list of orders behind which were never executed, which the employees laughed at, and which Johnathan himself forgot within five minutes after returning to his swivel chair. III Of course, all this expansion and feverish industrial activity on Nathan’s part had but one basis: The day he was twenty-one he was going to marry Carol and he proposed to have a business sizable enough and profitable enough to clothe her in purple and fine linen and make her a Somebody because she was the wife of Nathan Forge. The first month after Carol’s departure, and well along into the autumn, bulky epistles arrived for Nathan on an average of twice a week. Nathan had at once appealed to me to act as clearing house for this correspondence, and I therefore unwittingly kept a finger on the pulse of the courtship.