“What are you driving at?”
“Do you work for money alone?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
“No.” And he shook his head. “No, you don’t. You wouldn’t get enough fun out of it. You certainly do not work merely to add a few more dollars to your bank account and you are not in Wall Street because you like easy money. You get your fun some other way. Well, same here.”
I did not argue but asked him, “And how do you get your fun?”
“Well,” he confessed, “we’ve all got a weak spot.”
“And what’s yours?”
“Vanity,” he said.
“Well,” I told him, “you’ve succeeded in getting me to sign on. Now I want to sign off, and I am paying you two hundred dollars for ten minutes’ work. Isn’t that enough for your pride?”
“No,” he answered. “You see, all the rest of the bunch have been working Wall Street for months and failed to make expenses. They said it was the fault of the goods and the territory. So the office sent for me to prove that the fault was with their salesmanship and not with the books or the place. They were working on a 25 per cent commission. I was in Cleveland, where I sold eighty-two sets in two weeks. I am here to sell a certain number of sets not only to people who did not buy from the other agents but to people they couldn’t even get to see. That’s why they give me 33⅓ per cent.”