It amuses me to recall how simple she was. Who would ever suspect her of having been so, as she presides over our great establishments in town and in the country as if she were born to it? “Nonsense!” I answered. “You’d soon get used to it. You’re young yet, and a thousand times better looking than fat old Mrs. Judson. You’ll learn in no time. You’ll go up with me.”
“I don’t think they’re as happy as we are,” she said. “I ought to be ashamed of myself to be so envious and ungrateful.” But she sighed again.
I think she soon went to sleep. I lay awake hour after hour, a confusion of thoughts in my mind—we worry a great deal over nice points in morals when we are young. Then, suddenly, as it seemed to me, the command of destiny came—“You can be sole master, in name as well as in fact. You are that business. He has no right there. Put him out! He is only a drag, and will soon ruin everything. It is best for him—and you must!”
I tossed and turned. I said to myself, “No! No!” But I knew what I would do. I was not the man to toil for years for an object and then let weakness cheat me out of it. I knew I would make short shrift of a flabby and dangerous and short-sighted generosity when the time came.
One morning, about six months later, Mr. Judson came to me as I was busy at my desk and laid down a note for five hundred thousand dollars, signed by himself. “It’ll be all right for me to indorse the firm’s name upon that, won’t it?” he said, in a careless tone, holding to a corner of the note, as if he were assuming that I would say “Yes,” and he could then take it away.
A thrill of delight ran through me at this stretch of the hand of my opportunity for which I had been planning for years, and for which I had been waiting in readiness for nearly three months. I looked steadily at the note. “I don’t know,” I said, slowly, raising my eyes to his. His eyes shifted and a hurt expression came into them, as if he, not I, were refusing. “I’m busy just now. Leave it, won’t you? I’ll look at it presently.”
“Oh, certainly,” he said, in a surprised, shy voice. I did not look up at him again, but I saw that his hand—a narrow, smooth hand, not at all like mine—was trembling as he drew it away.
We did not speak again until late in the afternoon. Then I had to go to him about some other matter, and, as I was turning away, he said, timidly: “Oh, about that note——”
“It can’t be indorsed by the firm,” I said, abruptly.
There was a long silence between us. I felt that he was inwardly resenting what he must be calling the insolence of the “upstart” he had “created.” I was hating him for the contemptuous thoughts that seemed to me to be burning through the silence from his brain to mine, was hating him for putting me in a false position even before myself with his plausible appearance of being a generous gentleman—I abhor the idea of “gentleman” in business; it upsets everything, at once.