"Look at automobiles! If we fellers had been alive, we would not have let them specialty places crop up all over the place. Hardware stores oughter have the garage. We oughter have the profits of automobile accessories. Some fellers are getting alive to the job, but some still say we oughten ter butt into somebody else's line!" He sneered as he said this.
"If owned a hardware store I would sell anything I could get a profit on. I'd put in a line of pastry if I thought I could get away with it!"
"Your forty-five years in the hardware trade hasn't got you into a rut then, Larsen?" I said with a smile.
"You bet your life, nix, Boss! You are the first man that let me speak right out to him, and you know I don't mean to be—to be—you know what I mean—bossy like. But it gets my goat how hardware folks has let good things get away from them!"
I had sometimes wondered why Larsen, with all his experience and knowledge, and many good ideas that I had found him to have, hadn't got farther ahead in the world. I had decided that it was perhaps because he was lacking in a certain independence of spirit—and while he spoke freely to me, and wasn't afraid to correct me, it was more because I was young and inexperienced compared with him, and because I had got so I didn't take offense at it. Perhaps under an older and sterner boss he would have been rather afraid to give expression to his views. However, he certainly was valuable to me.
The conversation ended there, because the salesman from the Cincinnati Pencil Sharpener Company came in again. I didn't wait for him to say anything, but beckoned to him, and said:
"I can give you a little time now. I was really busy before, and I am afraid I spoke a little more sharply than I meant to."
"That's all right, Mr. Black," he replied. "I think I owe you an apology for losing my temper. A man in my position can't afford to lose his temper. I'll tell you now my proposition. Mr. Sirle of Hardware Times told me you were a coming man in the business and suggested I show you this line."
"Well," I replied hesitatingly, "it seems to me that a pencil sharpener is not just the thing for a hardware man to sell."
"Mr. Black," he responded, "I am not going to try to persuade you what a hardware store should or should not sell; but I want to show you, with your permission, what you can make by handling this line. I have spent most of the day around here calling on some of the residents and other people. I have taken orders for eighteen of these pencil sharpeners. I will turn these orders over to you and you can deliver them and make the profit on them."