 Americanized copies of French models had found special favor with the buyer of a certain large department store and that this alone gave the house a considerable volume of business. Jeff Manheimer, who superintended the work, was a commonplace man, with more method and system than taste or initiative.

Chaikin was the heart and the actual master of the establishment. Yet all this really wonderful designer received was forty-five dollars a week. He knew his value, and he saw that the two brothers were rapidly getting rich, but he was a quiet man, unaggressive and unassuming, and very likely he had not the courage to ask for a raise

As I now looked at him, with my heart full of rancor for
Manheimer, I exclaimed to myself, "What a fool!"
He appeared to me in a new light, as the willing victim of downright robbery. It seemed obvious that the Manheimers could not do without him, that he was in a position to dictate terms to them, even to make them accept him as a third partner. And once the matter had presented itself to me in that light it somehow began to vex me. It got on my nerves, as though it were an affair of my own. I complimented myself upon my keen sense of justice, but in reality this was my name for my disgust with Chaikin's passivity and for the annoyance and the burning ill-will which the rapid ascent of the firm aroused in me. I begrudged them—or, rather, Jeff—the money they were making through his efficiency

"The idiot!" I soliloquized. "He ought to start on his own hook with some smart business man for a partner. Let Jeff try to do without that 'lobster' of a Russian."

The idea took a peculiar hold upon my imagination. I could not look at Ansel Chaikin, or think of him, without picturing him leaving the Manheimers in a lurch and becoming a fatal competitor of theirs. I beheld their downfall. I gloated over it

But Chaikin lacked gumption and enterprise. What he needed was an able partner, some man of brains and force. And so, unbeknown to Chaikin, the notion was shaping itself in my mind of becoming his manufacturing partner.

The thought of Meyer Nodelman's humble beginnings and of the three hundred-odd dollars I had in my savings-bank whispered encouragement into my ear. I had heard of people who went into manufacturing with even less than that sum.

Moreover, it was reasonable to expect that Chaikin had laid up some money of his own. Our precarious life among unfriendly nations has
