“What do you mean—you’ll have it without me?” “Just what I said. I’ll go back to Ma—for good. Oh, I guess I can earn my own living again! I did it once, remember. You used to say I was the smartest girl in the box-shop—once!” And Milly began to sob openly as she trotted along by Nathan’s side. Pedestrians on the Avenue turned and stared. IV Extract from a letter mailed from the New York office of the Thorne Knitting Mills under date of October 3, 1916, to Theodore E. Thorne, vice president and sales manager at the main offices and plant, Paris, Vermont: ...I hardly know what to say, Ted. You’re putting me in a rotten dilemma. God knows I’m no knocker. Also the last thing in the world I’d want on my conscience would be the dirty work of knifing a poor devil in the back because he hasn’t had advantages which some of us have been lucky to receive. But what alternative are you leaving me when you put it up as a question of policy affecting the welfare of the Company? Forge came down here and spent the better part of a week going over things. As I’m leaving anyway, I was absolutely unprejudiced—you believe that, don’t you? I showed him all there was to show. He impressed me as being a fair business man, considering his age, a little higher than the average, perhaps. He’s got imagination and executive ability, especially the last, and there’s not a doubt he’d work his head off to make good. I think he’s especially endowed with the faculty for managing help. But this isn’t a factory down here, Ted. The office help requiring management, or even the local sales staff, are almost negligible. This job calls for a “mixer,” a diplomat, and a personality capable of holding the trade and adding to it by adroit business politics. I can conceive of Forge being a fair success out in the boardwalk towns, selling union suits to merchants who wait on the feminine trade with their vests unbuttoned and a toothpick between their lips. But running up against such smooth articles as old Anstruther, or the Caldwell boys or the Perkinsnaith people, they’d walk through him like a crooked lawyer driving a coach through a will written on the back of wall-paper.