Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/288

 expert? If you let one of those 'business-system' people inside the office he'd be trying to run the whole works. Maybe the idea was all right, but you couldn't get it executed. Well, while the whole proposition was up in the air, and everybody chewing the rag about it, somebody knocks at the door, and who is it? Why, Crittenden's son, just out of college, wanting a job. All nonsense, college, and yet what would it have taught a boy if not how to straighten out and classify information? Anyhow you could get him for next to nothing: boys out of college never expect to be paid anything to speak of, and a good reason why; because they aren't worth anything. Give him a year's try at it! Crittenden's son ought to have a little natural sense. It won't cost much; he can't do any harm; maybe he might work out a system that would be useful.

"So they offered the job at slightly more than office-boy wages to the college graduate. And what did he think about it? How had he been trained for such work? You know, Martha, how he'd been trained. What he knew about orderly arrangement of information was about what would go on the head of a pin! He'd been learning a few scattered items about English Literature and Greek Philosophy, and the latest inaccuracy about atoms; and a whole lot about how to get a football over a given line under given conditions. But incidentally and on the side, he'd had a pretty thorough course in poker, and a poker-face was the necessary equipment for that situation!"

He and Martha laughed, a light-hearted young laugh, that did them good and made them feel closer than ever to each other in the conspiracy of two against the world.

The rest of the year had been, Neale told her, a slow, dogged struggle to find out what after all it was nobody's business to tell him; to invent a system of recording what he found out that would not only be fool-proof but stenographer-proof; to collect exact statistics as to the cost of production and transportation; and to bring together items of account-keeping that had never before had even a speaking acquaintance with each other.