The Scarlet Letters Read Online Free Page B

rivals for partnership would be the men starting with him. Any associate passed over for partnership, a majority of which if the firm was to be kept a manageable size, would be assured of an equally well or even better paid job in a client or sister firm. Profits would be divided evenly among the partners, with certain gradations upwards with age and downwards with old age. The energy and unity of the firm as a team would not be dissipated by foreign branches; there would be one office and one alone. Oh, he had it all worked out!
    As he rose in the firm Ambrose was careful to cultivate close friendships with his fellow clerks, particularly those in whom he saw the most brilliant legal future. He discarded the somewhat shaggy appearance he had adopted in academe, and took care now to be well groomed, with his thick, prematurely graying hair properly clipped and combed, his square chin held up but not arrogantly, his large lanky figure no longer slouching but straight. People meeting Ambrose knew that they were in contact with a man who knew what he was doing and what he could do for them.
    His family now came round to something like an appreciation. His father gave him money that he no longer needed, and his mother allowed him to kiss her without placing a hand on his shoulder.
    Bertha was delighted with him, but not surprised; she was only disappointed that his work prevented him from having a social life as animated as his legal one. Stuffy actually brought him some slight and undesirable business, and Rosebud, who despite a rich husband had only a small property of her own, named him an executor of her will.
    There were still periods when his old black moods would descend upon him, days, though infrequent, when he would without excuse fail to appear at the office and drink inordinately in his small apartment, and growl at his new image in the mirror and confound himself for succumbing to the false standards of the old world of the de Peysters and falser ones of the new world of the Goulds and Fisks. Yet he was still beginning to wonder if, given the powers of a president with a majority behind him in both houses of Congress, he would do more than add a few teeth to the Sherman Act and lower the tariffs. The world, as Justice Holmes had said, wouldn't be much better off if the riches of the rich were scattered among the innumerable poor. It would be Ambrose's function, if he had any at all, to grease the wheels of such financial machinery as kept things going. But his law firm, if it ever should be his, would at least be a beacon of honesty! Uncle Charley was all very well, but he had his moments of compromise with men who emitted a faint scent of brimstone. Ambrose would have to wait. But he could wait! Then he would put the bottle down, take a shower and go back to work.
    There was little time for love in his busy life, but there was some. When his uncle, foreseeing the day when his nephew might become a partner and desiring him to have experience in all the firm's departments, transferred him for a season into the field of trusts and estates, Ambrose found himself spending more time than was actually required drawing a will and trusts for the pretty and flirtatious young bride of an aging financier. Uncle Charley, who had a sharp nose for the ultra-proper, scented trouble early, and, anxious not to have the financier upset, summoned his nephew for a little "chat." To forestall resentment he cloaked his caution in terms of general advice.
    "You never knew my partner, Oscar Tully, did you, Ambrose? He retired before you joined us. He was not quite a man of our background—he had had to make his own way in life—but he was a first-class lawyer, and he had a wise and pithy way of expressing basic truths. 'Give a lady client everything you have above the waist, nothing from below.'"
    Ambrose was amused by his own shock at so unexpected a crudity. "You mean never have an affair with a client, sir? Do you imply that I'm