only to one who has known, too bitterly, what it is to be without a decent suit of one's own. Dave knew; he was the oldest of six children of the Methodist minister of Itanaca, Illinois, and not until he came to Northwestern, when he was eighteen, had he worn a suit which was new and bought for himself.
Of course he had earned money for clothes for himself many times before that year; as long as he could remember he had earned, and sometimes he had been paid; but frequently not, either because his father had forbidden him to take dimes and nickels for services done and errands run "which he ought to be glad to do for friends" or because some neighbors too readily adopted his father's attitude. His father, in the year when Dave first became cognizant of family finances, had a salary of eight hundred dollars. This year David Herrick, besides carrying full class work as a senior in the university, had earned twenty-nine hundred dollars, reckoned from January to January, and was liable for income tax on that amount with deductions legally allowed as head of a family with three children under eighteen.
The family was his father's; but Dave, having added seventeen hundred dollars to his father's twelve, actually furnished their chief support. He earned the money selling motorcars to the customers listed on the cards in that box on his desk. His particular method of operations was his own and, as seemed to be indicated when somebody else like Lan Blake visited the trade, it required Dave, himself, to make it effective.
He had what somebody in a philosophy course
