the matter with that, as an interesting problem in ingenuity?  I tell you, Mr. Welles, you ought to talk to my wife about this.  It’s as much her idea as mine.  We worked it out together, little by little.  It was when Elly was a baby.  She was the second child, you know, and we began to feel grown-up.  By that time I was pretty sure I could make a go of the business.  And we first began to figure out what we were up to.  Tried to see what sort of a go we wanted the business to have.  We first began to make some sense out of what we were doing in life.”

Mr. Welles found himself overwhelmed by a reminiscent ache at this phrase and burst out, his words tinged with the bitterness he tried to keep out of his mind, “Isn’t that an awful moment when you first try to make some sense out of what you are doing in life!  But suppose you had gone on doing it, always, always, till you were an old man, and never succeeded!  Suppose all you seemed to be accomplishing was to be able to hand over to the sons of the directors more money than was good for them?  I tell you, Mr. Crittenden, I’ve often wished that once, just once, before I died I could be sure that I had done anything that was of any use to anybody.”  He went on, nodding his head, “What struck me so about what Mr. Bayweather said is that I’ve often thought about doctors myself, and envied them.  They take money for what they do, of course, but they miss lots of chances to make more, just so’s to be of some use.  I’ve often thought when they were running the prices up and up in our office just because they could, that a doctor would be put out of his profession in no time by public opinion, if he ever tried to screw the last cent out of everybody, the way business men do as a matter of course.”

Mr. Crittenden protested meditatively against this.  “Oh, don’t you think maybe there’s a drift the other way among decent business people now?  Why, when Marise and I were first trying to get it clear in our own heads, we kept it pretty dark, I tell you, that we weren’t in it only for what money we could make, because we knew how loony we’d seem to anybody else.  But don’t you see any signs that lately maybe the same idea is striking lots of people in America?”

“No, I do not!” said Mr. Welles emphatically.  “With a profiteer on every corner!

“But look-y-here, the howl about profiteers, isn’t that something new?  Isn’t that a dumb sort of application to business of the doctor’s standard of service?  Twenty years ago, would anybody have thought of doing anything but uneasily admiring a grocer who made all the money he could out of his business?  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’ people would have thought then.  Everybody else did.  Twenty years ago, would anybody have dreamed of legally preventing a rich man from buying all the coal he wanted, whether there was enough for everybody, or not?”