ccordingly when Burdett Senior or one of the
sons turned a customer over to David he spoke of him as a salesman. But
David called himself a "demonstrator." For a short time he even
succeeded in persuading the other salesmen to speak of themselves as
demonstrators, but the shipping clerks and bookkeepers laughed them out
of it. They could not laugh David out of it. This was so, partly because
he had no sense of humor, and partly because he had a
great-great-grandfather. Among the salesmen on lower Broadway, to
possess a great-great-grandfather is unusual, even a great-grandfather
is a rarity, and either is considered superfluous. But to David the
possession of a great-great-grandfather was a precious and open delight.
He had possessed him only for a short time. Undoubtedly he always had
existed, but it was not until David's sister Anne married a doctor in
Bordentown, New Jersey, and became socially ambitious, that David
emerged as a Son of Washington.

It was sister Anne, anxious to "get in" as a "Daughter" and wear a
distaff pin in her shirt-waist, who discovered the revolutionary
ancestor. She unearthed him, or rather ran him to earth, in the
graveyard of the Presbyterian church at Bordentown. He was no less a
person than General Hiram Greene, and he had fought with Washington at
Trenton and at Princeton. Of this there was no doubt. That, later, on
moving to New York, his descendants became peace-loving salesmen did not
affect his record. To enter a society founded on heredity, the important
thing is first to catch your ancestor, and having made sure of him,
David entered the Society of the Sons of Washington with flying colors.
He was not unlike the man who had been speaking prose for forty years
without knowing it. He was not unlike the other man who woke to find
himself famous. He had gone to bed a timid, near-sighted, underpaid
salesman without a relative in the world, except a married sister in
Bordentown, and he awoke to find he was a direct descendant of "Neck or
Nothing" Greene, a revolutionary hero, a friend of Washington, a man
whose portrait hung in the State House at Trenton. David's life had
lacked color. The day he carried his certificate of membership to the
big jewelry store uptown and purchased two rosettes, one for each of his
two coats, was the proudest of his life.

The other men in the Broadway office took a different view. As Wyckoff,
one of Burdett's flying squadron of travelling salesmen, said,