Willie’s parents were of the opinion that the next best thing to having dollars is to make a bold pretense of having them and Willie was too young to criticize their judgment.
Willie’s father was of the opinion that the most important thing to attend to in this life was the getting of more dollars than you need, and that next in importance to that was the adding to your surplus. Willie saw that his father was a failure in his own eyes and he saw the mighty struggle he made to hide his failure.
Willie was unfortunate in being bright enough to observe these things and not bright enough to judge wherein they were poor philosophy.
When Willie was old enough he went into a broker’s office and there he observed that a great many were the same kind of people as his pa and his ma, and he made up his mind that he had to become rich to escape the miseries that trying to be SOMEBODY on NOTHING entailed.
Willie had youthful inclinations, but the fear of poverty had been so drubbed into him that he curbed all such, promising himself that he would follow them when he got rich.
Ten years with the brokers gave Willie no liking for the business or affection for his employers, but he never dreamed of risking having idle time on his hands earning no money by throwing up a sure thing for an uncertainty.
He thought of marriage at this time, but put the thought aside by promising himself the joys of a happy marriage when he got rich. His close attention to business and saving and cautious ways gave him a high place in the estimation of his employers, who now and then “let him into good things” and Willie’s bank account began to swell and his heart to shrink. He had never set up in his mind a definite figure to represent riches, but he had an indefinite idea of something in the neighbourhood of a million or so. Time did not wait for Willie to get rich, it sped on. Willie became a partner in his firm, became worth a million, two million, three million. He buried the other members of his firm, settled with the widows cheap and became “THE FIRM” worth more millions. He forgot all about youthful pleasures, all about marriage, all about life, all about death, all about everything but dollars; dollars claimed all his time and thought, everything became trivial except dollars. Instead of Willie owning the dollars the dollars began to own him.
Close attention to the business of caring for, watching and nursing dollars for so long a time at last told so on Willie’s health that he broke down, his liver, his kidneys, his heart and his lungs and other unnecessary appendages refused to do business even for dollars.
Doctors were called in.
Doctors said, “Willie must rest.”