Studying how to stab competitors in the back and establish monopoly.

As a manager, he may some day rise to ten or fifteen thousand a year--unless managers' salaries go down, as it's likely they will.

As a financier, he might rise to--to _our_ class." Whitney grunted, the frown of his brows and the smile on his sardonic mouth contradicting each other.

He could not but be pleased by the shrewdness of his son's criticism of his own half-sincere, half-hypocritical tribute to virtues that were on the wane; but at the same time he did not like such frank expression of cynical truth from a son of his.

Also, he at the bottom still had some of the squeamishness that was born into him and trained into him in early youth; he did not like to be forced squarely to face the fact that real business had been relegated to the less able or less honest, while the big rewards of riches and respect were for the sly and stealthy.