. For it requires as unusual a combination of qualities to be
a successful boss, as to be a successful merchant or banker. Yet one
cannot tell. I myself have never been able to say what elements make a
boss, except that he must be in sympathy with the men whom he tries to
guide, and that he must be meeting them. Mr. Curtis had a broad, loving
nature and sympathies, and if the people had discovered them, they would
have liked him. But the reserve which comes with culture makes one
largely conceal one's true feelings. Super-refinement puts a man out of
sympathy with much that is basic in humanity, and it needs a great love,
or a great sacrifice of feeling, to condone it. It is hard work for what
Watts calls a tough, and such a man, to understand and admire one
another."

"But don't you think," said Mrs. D'Alloi, "that the people of our class
are better and finer?"

"The expression 'noblesse oblige' shows that," said madame.

"My experience has led me to think otherwise," said Peter. "Of course
there is a difference of standards, of ideals, and of education, in
people, and therefore there are differences in conduct. But for their
knowledge of what is right and wrong, I do not think the so-called
better classes, which should, in truth, be called the prosperous
classes, live up to their own standards of right any more than do the
poor."

"Oh, I say, draw it mild. At least exclude the criminal classes," cried
Watts. "They know better."

"We all know better. But we don't live up to our knowledge. I crossed on
one of the big Atlantic liners lately, with five hundred other saloon
passengers. They were naturally people of intelligence, and presumably
of easy circumstances. Yet at least half of those people were plotting
to rob our government of money by contriving plans to avoid paying
duties truly owed. To do this all of them had to break our laws, and in
most cases had, in addition, to lie deliberately. Many of them were
planning to accomplish this theft by the bribery of the custom-house
inspectors, thus not merely making thieves of themselves, but bribing
other men to do wrong. In this city I can show you blocks so densely
inhabited that they are election districts in themselves. Blocks in
which twenty people live and sleep in a single room, year after year;
where the birth of a little life into the world means that all must eat
less and be less warm; where man and woman, old and young, must shiver
in winter, and stifle