customers and sold them goods. But he never mentioned this
to his clerk lest Rudd be tempted to the sin of vanity, and
incidentally to demanding an increase in that salary which had remained
the same since he had been promoted from delivery-boy.

Kittredge found that Rudd kept his secrets as he kept everybody's else.
Professing church member as he was, Rudd earnestly palmed off shopworn
stock for fresh invoices, declared that the obsolete Piccadillies which
Kittredge had snapped up from a bankrupt sale were worn on all the best
feet on Fifth Avenoo, and blandly substituted "just as good" for
advertised wares that Kittredge did not carry.

Besides, when no customer was in the shop he spent the time at the back
window, doctoring tags--as the King of France negotiated the hill--by
marking up prices, then marking them down.

But when he took his hat from the peg and set it on his head, he put on
his private conscience. Whatever else he did, he never lied or cheated
to his own advantage.

And so everybody in town liked William Rudd, and nobody admired him. He
was treated with the affectionate contempt of an old family servant. But
he had his ambitions and great ones, ambitions that reached past himself
into the future of another generation. He felt the thrill that stirs the
acorn, fallen into the ground and hidden there, but destined to father
an oak. His was the ambition beyond ambition that glorifies the seed in
the loam and ennobles the roots of trees thrusting themselves downward
and gripping obscurity in order that trunks and branches, flowers and
fruits, pods and cones, may flourish aloft.

Eventually old Clay Kittredge died, and the son chopped the "Jr."
curlicue from the end of his name and began a new regime. The old
Kittredge had sought only his own aggrandizement, and his son was his
son. The new Clay Kittredge had gone to public school with Rudd and they
continued to be "Clay" and "Will" to each other; no one would ever have
called Rudd by so demonstrative a name as "Bill."

When Clay second stepped into his father's boots--and shoes--he began to
enlarge the business, hoping to efface his father's achievements by his
own. The shop gradually expanded to a department store for covering all
portions of the anatomy and supplying inner wants as well.

Rudd was so overjoyed at not being uprooted and flung aside to die that
he never observed the shrewd irony of Kittredge's phrase, "You may
remain, Will, with no r