to accept labour from clerks whom you can't pay, or to sell
property to women who say they want it and are satisfied with the
price? We make our income by selling property. As soon as the sales
stop, the income stops. Well, the sales have stopped. But the expense
goes on. We have literally thousands of unsettled contracts. We must
keep our staff together. We have debts to pay, and we owe it to our
creditors to make collections so that we can pay those debts, and we
can't make collections without staff. I sympathize with your feelings
on this matter, Dave, but what's a man to do? It's like war; we must
kill or be killed. Business is war, of a kind. Why, on the property
we are now holding the taxes alone will amount to twenty thousand
dollars a year. And I put it up to you; if we are going to stand on
sentiment, who's going to pay the taxes?"

"I know; I know," said Dave, whose anger over the treatment of the
Hardys was already subsiding. "We are in the grip of the System. As
you have said, it is kill or be killed. Still--in war they don't
usually kill women and non-combatants. That is the point I'm trying to
make. I've no sentiment about others who are in the game as we are.
If you limit your operations to them----"

"The trouble is, you can't. They're wise. They see the bottom going,
and they quit. Most of them have already moved on. A few firms, like
ourselves, will stay and try to fight it out; try, at least, to close
up with a clean sheet, if we must close up. But we can't wind up a
business without selling the stock on hand, and to whom are we to sell
it, if not to people who want it? That is what you seem to object to."

"You place me in rather an unfair light," Dave protested. "What I
object to is taking the life savings of people--people of moderate
circumstances, mainly--in exchange for property which we know to be
worth next to nothing."

"Yet you admit that we must clean up, don't you?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"And there's no other way, Dave," said Conward, rising and placing an
arm on his partner's shoulder, "I sympathize with your point of view,
but, my boy, it's pure sentiment, and sentiment has no place in
business. And you remember the terms of our partnership, don't you?"

Dave hesitated a few moments, as he threw his mind back over the years
that had gone by since the day when Conward proposed a partnership to
him. He saw again his little office where he ground out "stuff