“'What!' she exclaimed. 'He expects my son to become a common drummer and travel around selling goods to little shopkeepers! Impossible!'
“'Why?' I asked.
“'Because he does not have to. My grandfather, the late Joshua Shrimp-stone, left us enough so that we do not have to do that kind of thing. Besides. I do not think it is necessary. My son has intelligence enough to learn those menial pursuits without having to do them.'
“'You are wrong,' I said. 'The American way is to begin at the bottom. It's a very good way—the only way by which one may be thoroughly prepared for management. In that way he gets hold of the sense that is common in the rank and file of his army, and knowing that, he will know what to do in every emergency.'
“'If that is true, John might as well have been born poor. Does his position and the fact that I have five thousand shares of stock count for nothing?'
“'Well, you get dividends on the stock. If you expect to get dividends also on the position that you got from your grandfather you are wrong. In this country we have no crown princes who begin at the top. Inherited superiority is an amusing thing to look at but a poor foundation for credit. In this country we bank on demonstrated superiority.'
“Mrs. Butters rose and haughtily withdrew from my office with the pride of the Shrimpstones glittering in her eye.
“Now, John Butters was a good fellow. He was over-mothered. Indeed, the word for it is smothered. He was like a man cast into the sea with a Shrimpstone tied around his neck. He would have done well with half a chance. I never saw a man so badly in need of poverty, so damned with affectionate, gilded, comfortable female despotism. She bought one business after another for him and put him in at the top. He has failed in all these undertakings. His way is littered with broken crowns and the wreckage of little kingdoms.
“Now his youth is gone and he is the same useless, ineffective good fellow that he was in the beginning. For years he and his mother have been sitting on that high horse of hers and galloping around to the amusement of all beholders. He has got tired of it and jumped off and settled down as the clerk of a wife who takes him lightly.
“He is the victim of assumed superiority which is nothing more or less than Williamism.”