If I had not seen the opportunity to get it through Judson and Company, I should have retired from that house years before I got the partnership. But I did see it there, saw it coming even before I was general manager, saw it the first time I got a peep into the private affairs of Mr. Judson. Judson and Company, like all old-established houses, was honeycombed with carelessness and wastefulness. To begin with, it treated its employees on a basis of mixed business and benevolence, and that is always bad unless the benevolence is merely an ingenious pretext for getting out of your people work that you don’t pay for. But Mr. Judson, having a good deal of the highfaluting _grand seigneur_ about him, made the benevolence genuine. Then, the theory was that the Judsons were born merchants, and knew all there was to be known, and did not need to attend to business. Mr. Judson, being firmly convinced of his greatness, and being much engaged socially and in posing as a great merchant at luncheons and receptions to distinguished strangers and the like, put me in full control as soon as he made me general manager. He interfered in the business only occasionally, and then merely to show how large and generous he was--to raise salaries, to extend unwise credits, to bolster up decaying mills that had long sold goods to the house, to indorse for his friends. Friends! Who that can and will lend and indorse has not hosts of friends? What I have waited to see before selecting my friends is the friendship that survives the death of its hope of favours--and I’m still waiting. As soon as I became partner I confirmed in detail the suspicion, or, rather, the instinctive knowledge, which had kept me from looking elsewhere for my opportunity. I recall distinctly the day my crisis came. It had two principal events. The first was my discovery that Mr. Judson had got the firm and himself so entangled that he was in my power. I confess my impulse was to take a course which a weaker or less courageous man would have taken--away from the course of the strong man with the higher ambition and the broader view of life and morals. And it was while I seemed to be wavering--I say “seemed to be” because I do not think a strong, far-sighted man of resolute purpose is ever “squeamish,” as they call it--while, I say, I was in the mood of uncertainty which often precedes energetic action, we, my wife and I, went to dinner at the Judsons. That dinner was the second event of my crucial day. Judson’s family and mine did not move in the same social circle. When people asked my wife if she knew Mrs. Judson--which they often maliciously did--she always answered: “Oh, no--my husband keeps our home life and his business distinct; and, you know, New York is very large. The Judsons and we haven’t the same friends.” That was her way of hiding our rankling wound--for it rankled with me as much as with her; in those days we had everything in common, like the humble people that we were.