"This is the way this kind of a business begins," he replied composedly. That interlude of actual business after the ferocious activity of renting, equipping and furnishing an office, getting stationery printed and engraved, installing a ticker, making that mysterious body of connections that was Fred’s province, was sufficiently exhilarating to make me accept it without much scrutiny. After all, what could I do? This was the furrow in which my plow was set and this, I suppose, is the custom of the country. "How," I could not help wonderingly asking, "did you land the effulgent Visconti?" "Oh, he’s a good scout," explained Fred. "He runs a banking house for his fellow dagoes in Macdougal Street. He saw we were new and he likes to give young fellows a chance. He was quite frank. You see, it’s nothing for the big houses to sell ten bonds or so. But he knows that to us just opening up it means a lot more than the commission. It means a Sale. Oh, he’s a sport, all right." "That surprises me more than I can say," I told him. "There are some good-hearted brutes even in this business," growled Fred, "and don’t you forget it." "Do you think," I asked with a twinge of shame, "he saw through your telephoning business and that rigmarole of yours to me in the booth?" "Damn if I don’t think he did!" roared Fred. "But never mind. He’s a sport. And some day, when we’re big guns, we’ll show him that we appreciate his hand-out by putting him on to something good—see if we don’t!" I felt as shamefaced as though we had committed a felony. Yet I suppose that this is the ordinary comparatively innocent chicane of even honest business, remnants of oriental chaffering and huckstering that still survive. I am hoping we shall grow out of it. Though at times I suspect a certain flamboyancy of temperament in Fred that makes him resort to such shifts rather than not. A man who had purchased some bonds called up and inquired whether we would take them back. There was no reason for Fred’s offering anything but an endeavor to dispose of them. But instead his grandiose reply was: "Why, certainly we shall take those bonds back, Mr. Smith—and as many more of them as you’ve got. Yes, bring them down by all means." Once he had hung up the receiver he turned toward me with blank dismay, muttering: "Now what the hell shall we do with those things?" I own to a flash of genuine anger at his imbecile untruthfulness. "You don’t know what to do?" I spluttered. "Then why on earth did you speak as though you had a dozen buyers waiting in a row?" "Because that’s business," he tried to shout me down. "That devil will have more confidence in us if we let him go back on his bargain than if he made a lot of money on it. Don’t you know human nature?" "Not human nature like that," I retorted bitterly. "Tell me what you are going to do about it."