“It was work performed!  And now you feed me, when then you let me starve, forbade me your house, and damned me because I wouldn’t get a job.  And the work was already done, all done.  And now, when I speak, you check the thought unuttered on your lips and hang on my lips and pay respectful attention to whatever I choose to say.  I tell you your party is rotten and filled with grafters, and instead of flying into a rage you hum and haw and admit there is a great deal in what I say.  And why?  Because I’m famous; because I’ve a lot of money.  Not because I’m Martin Eden, a pretty good fellow and not particularly a fool.  I could tell you the moon is made of green cheese and you would subscribe to the notion, at least you would not repudiate it, because I’ve got dollars, mountains of them.  And it was all done long ago; it was work performed, I tell you, when you spat upon me as the dirt under your feet.”

But Martin did not shout out.  The thought gnawed in his brain, an unceasing torment, while he smiled and succeeded in being tolerant.  As he grew silent, Bernard Higginbotham got the reins and did the talking.  He was a success himself, and proud of it.  He was self-made.  No one had helped him.  He owed no man.  He was fulfilling his duty as a citizen and bringing up a large family.  And there was Higginbotham’s Cash Store, that monument of his own industry and ability.  He loved Higginbotham’s Cash Store as some men loved their wives.  He opened up his heart to Martin, showed with what keenness and with what enormous planning he had made the store.  And he had plans for it, ambitious plans.  The neighborhood was growing up fast.  The store was really too small.  If he had more room, he would be able to put in a score of labor-saving and money-saving improvements.  And he would do it yet.  He was straining every effort for the day when he could buy the adjoining lot and put up another two-story frame building.  The upstairs he could rent, and the whole ground-floor of both buildings would be Higginbotham’s Cash Store.  His eyes glistened when he spoke of the new sign that would stretch clear across both buildings.

Martin forgot to listen.  The refrain of “Work performed,” in his own brain, was drowning the other’s clatter.  The refrain maddened him, and he tried to escape from it.

“How much did you say it would cost?” he asked suddenly.

His brother-in-law paused in the middle of an expatiation on the business opportunities of the neighborhood.  He hadn’t said how much it would cost.  But he knew.  He had figured it out a score of times.

“At the way lumber is now,” he said, “four thousand could do it.”

“Including the sign?”

“I didn’t count on that.  It’d just have to come, onc’t the buildin’ was there.”

“And the ground?”

“Three thousand more.”

He leaned forward, licking his lips, nervously spreading and closing his fingers, while he watched Martin write a check.  When it was passed over to him, he glanced at the amount-seven thousand dollars.