"Mortimer can do anything. Anything."
"Can he?" Why doesn't he show it then? He went to work at sixteen and is
now twenty-two. He is drawing just fifty dollars a month. He's well liked
in the firm, too."
"Why don't they raise his salary?"
"Because that's all he's worth to them. He's a good steady honest clerk,
nothing more."
"He's very young--"
"If a man has initiative, ability, any sort of constructive power in his
brain he shows it by the time he is twenty-two--if he has been in that
forcing house for four or five years. That is the whole history of this
country. And employers are always on the look-out for those qualities
and only too anxious to find them and push a young man on and up. Many
a president of a great business started life as a clerk, or even office
boy--"
"That is what I have always known would happen to Morty. I am sure, sure,
that you are doing him a cruel injustice."
"I hope I am. But I am a failure myself and I know what a man needs in the
way of natural equipment to make a success of his life."
"But he is so energetic and industrious and honorable and likable and--"
"I was all that."
"Then--" Mrs. Dwight's voice trailed off; it sounded flat and old. "What do
you both lack?"
"Brains."
V
Mrs. Dwight had repeated this conversation to Gora shortly before her
death, and the girl in her reminiscent mood recalled it as she stared with
somber eyes and ironic lips at the havoc the fire was playing with those
lofty mansions which had stood to her all these intervening years as
symbols of the unpardonable injustice of class.
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