“We now know for a cinchety that you are the guilty goop because you fell for a plant that we had cleverly framed up with the kindly assistance of myself.
“AND, since we propose to run this roost harmoniously—radiating a wee wisp of sunshine and fellowship wherever we can, and making Business a pleasure instead of a punch-up—there does not seem to be any place around these puritanical precincts for a leaky radiator.
“You are bright and clever, and you don’t injure your spine trying to get out of the path of an idea, and, by all the rules but one, you should shoot right to the top of any business.
“The one rule that you have not yet sponged up is that Success is more than brains and bustle. Success is the art of closing up the Exhaust occasionally.
“I can find no doubt in any hole or corner of my mind that you have many times scratched your busy little head and wondered why you have remained in the same job all these centuries while other men not so clever as your oblique self have sailed right past you into the harbor of Heavy Responsibility With Correspondingly Light Pay. The reason is as stated in yon foregoing.
“Be it known to you further that no Business can succeed without Loyalty and Co-operation. Modern Business demands of every man that he be loyal, or be off.
“Pin-headedness, tale-peddling and office politics are barnacles on the barque of Business, and the Firm that does not scrape them off is doomed to decay.
“Any man with a brow an inch over all, should know that the lot of the Leaker means to be ultimately despised by the very men he has made confidants of.
“Every time you have started one of those he-said-that-you-said-that-I-said stories of yours, you have rawed up all the decent men of this Office.
“Today you stand about as popular around here as a hair in the butter; but you don’t know it, because, like all back-fence babblers, you are foggy up on the perceptive plane, and you think that the man who listens must like yourself be loose.