“You bet your life it does not,” agreed her husband, drawing with satisfaction on his excellent cigar, “and old J. P. didn’t put up any bluff about it. He never said he enjoyed it. He said it was just a part of the job, and you’ve got to stand up to it if you’re going to grow up to carry a man’s load. You’re there to do your best for the business. He got another point over to me, a good one--even for the lame ducks, it’s kinder to throw ’em right out as soon as you’re sure they can’t make good. Don’t let ’em stay on and gather mold till they can’t make a good try at anything else. That’s what made it so hard to tell Knapp he was through. Uncle Charley ought to have told him that, after he’d been a month in the store, twelve years ago. It’s a crime to let a man stay on and vegetate and get mildewed like that. It must have been clear for anybody but a blind man to see, after he’d been a month at his desk, that he’d never be anything but a dead loss in the business-world, what with his ill health, and his wool-gathering, and his tags of poetry! Uncle Charley ought to have pushed him off to be a dish-washer, or a college professor, or one of those jobs that a man without any jump in him can hold. It’s just a sample of the way poor Uncle Charley let the business run downhill ever since he knew he had that cancer. You can’t blame him, in a manner of speaking. But the fact is that the whole works from the stock-room to the heating plant was just eaten up with dry rot.” “I’m sorry about that Mr. Knapp though, personally,” said his wife. “He has a wife and three young children, you know.” “The devil he has!” said Jerome annoyed. “Isn’t that just like him? Well, I’ll try to look him up to-morrow and see if I can’t suggest _some_thing else. Or give him a check with the thanks of the firm. That’d be the cheapest way out. I know right now there’s no getting any decent work out of him. Wherever I put him, he’d be like a bit of cotton waste clogging up an oil-pipe.” “How about the accounting department, anyhow?” asked Nell. “Have you got it straightened out?” “Yes, now that Knapp has gone I guess it will run all right. Thank heavens, there’s one department in the department-store business that’s pretty well standardized. That young expert accountant McKenzie and Blair sent on has straightened out the awful mess it was in. You can tell where you stand now without closing down and taking a month’s work to unravel the snarls. And I guess Bronson is young enough to keep it running. I’ll give him the chance anyway; he’s the livest wire on that side of the business if he is an awful roughneck! If he’ll come through, it’ll save time having to break somebody else in.”