This, a fortnight after his return from Europe, from marrying Janet to Aristide, Viscount Brunais.  He had yielded to his secret snobbishness—­Matilda thought it was her diplomacy—­and had given Janet a dowry so extravagant that when old Saint Berthe heard the figures, he took advantage of the fact that only the family lawyer was present to permit a gleam of nature to show through his mask of elegant indifference to the “coarse side of life.”  Whitney had the American good sense to despise his wife, his daughter, and himself for the transaction.  For years furious had been his protestations to his family, to his acquaintances, and to himself against “society,” and especially against the incursions of that “worm-eaten titled crowd from the other side.”  So often had he repeated those protests that certain phrases had become fixedly part of his conversation, to make the most noise when he was violently agitated, as do the dead leaves of a long-withered but still firmly attached bough.  Thus he was regarded in Chicago as an American of the old type; but being human, his strength had not been strong enough to resist the taint in the atmosphere he had breathed ever since he began to be very rich and to keep the company of the pretentious.  His originally sound constitution had been gradually undermined, just as “doing like everybody else”—­that is, everybody in his set of pirates disguised under merchant flag and with a few deceptive bales of goods piled on deck—­had undermined his originally sound business honor.

Arthur answered, thanking him for the offered position, but declining it.  “What you say about my work,” he wrote, “encourages me to ask a favor.  I wish to be transferred from one mechanical department to another until I have made the round.  Then, perhaps, I may venture to ask you to renew your offer.”

Whitney showed this to Ross.  “Now, there’s the sort of son I’d be proud of!” he exclaimed.

Ross lifted his eyebrows.  “Really!” said he.  “Why?”

“Because he’s a man,” retorted his father, with obvious intent of satirical contrast.  “Because within a year or two he’ll know the business from end to end—­as his father did—­as I do.”

“And what good will that do him?” inquired Ross, with fine irony.  “You know it isn’t in the manufacturing end that the money’s made nowadays.  We can hire hundreds of good men to manufacture for us.  I should say he’d be wiser were he trying to get a practical education.”

“Practical!”

“Precisely.  Studying how to stab competitors in the back and establish monopoly.  As a manager, he may some day rise to ten or fifteen thousand a year—­unless managers’ salaries go down, as it’s likely they will.  As a financier, he might rise to—­to our class.”