Mr. Dwight took his pipe from his mouth and also cast a glance toward the parlor, but the absorbed players were beyond the range of his rather weak voice. "I mean this," he said with nothing of his usual vague hesitancy of speech. "I'm not so sure that Morty is beyond clerk size." "You--you--John Dwight--your son--" The thin layer of pale flesh on Mrs. Dwight's face seemed to collapse upon its harsh framework with the terrified wrath that shook her. Her mouth fell apart, and hot smarting tears welled slowly to her eyes, faded with long years of stitching; not only for her own family but for many others when money had been more than commonly scarce. "Mortimer can do anything. Anything." "Can he? Why doesn't he show it then? He went to work at sixteen and is now twenty-two. He is drawing just fifty dollars a month. He's well liked in the firm, too." "Why don't they raise his salary?" "Because that's all he's worth to them. He's a good steady honest clerk, nothing more." "He's very young--" "If a man has initiative, ability, any sort of constructive power in his brain he shows it by the time he is twenty-two--if he has been in that forcing house for four or five years. That is the whole history of this country. And employers are always on the look-out for those qualities and only too anxious to find them and push a young man on and up. Many a president of a great business started life as a clerk, or even office boy--" "That is what I have always known would happen to Morty. I am sure, sure, that you are doing him a cruel injustice." "I hope I am. But I am a failure myself and I know what a man needs in the way of natural equipment to make a success of his life." "But he is so energetic and industrious and honorable and likable and--" "I was all that." "Then--" Mrs. Dwight's voice trailed off; it sounded flat and old. "What do you both lack?" "Brains." V Mrs. Dwight had repeated this conversation to Gora shortly before her death, and the girl in her reminiscent mood recalled it as she stared with somber eyes and ironic lips at the havoc the fire was playing with those lofty mansions which had stood to her all these intervening years as symbols of the unpardonable injustice of class. She recalled another of the few occasions when Mrs. Dwight, who believed in acceptance and contentment, had been persuaded to discuss the idiosyncrasies of her adopted city.