You know that this business, as the New York territory has always done, contains a big portion of the personal element. Many’s the time we might have lost business with some of the heavy-weights if I hadn’t been “in right” personally with their families and womenfolk. Take Haymarker and the Tonowanda affair last June: you may not have known it, but I got old Haymarker and his wife to come out to the Long Island place for the week-end—or mother did, which amounts to the same thing—and played around with him until the psychological moment. Before he returned to town he clapped me on the shoulder and said: “Let’s forget the business fuss, Fred. We’re too good friends in a social way to let a matter of a few dollars break up our relations outside the office.” ...and that’s how young Forge must carry on, and I’m frank to tell you, Ted, I don’t believe he’s there. Oh, he may catch on in a year or so, but the cost to the company in the meantime may be ruinous. Why should the Thorne Knitting Mills pay for the education of a man who should have received that education at home from his parents? It’s a cruel handicap he’s under, but business is business. What his folks can have been thinking of is beyond me. And his wife—oh, my God! ...perhaps the average outsider would say that a man’s wife down here would have little bearing on his job. But believe me, Ted, it isn’t so. Maybe I’m over-emphasizing the social part, but business is sometimes a bit more than price asked and price paid. There are times when personality, family connections, tact, diplomacy, politics played by a fellow’s wife in a social way can mean thousands of dollars in the course of a year. And poor Forge has a millstone around his neck and an anvil tied to each wrist. ...I’ve nothing against her because she comes from a small town. But just because a person comes from a small town is no license to show themselves as mud-hut peasants who wear their boots to bed. A certain nicety of taste is expected of the least of us. And honestly, Ted, that girl Forge calls his wife is absolutely impossible. He must have found her and married her from the lowest class of factory help, just because she was female. ...she came to the dinner in a cheap afternoon frock whose shrieking color would stop a train—she clutched him like a poor relation—mother was almost a nervous wreck when the ordeal was over, and I should have been kicked for pulling any such stunt. She’s been all the week figuring out ways to apologize to her guests. The height of Mrs. Forge’s mentality and idea of dinner wit was an anecdote about somebody up in your town changing his trousers.