Excerpt from The Salaried Man: The Story, in Two Episodes, of an Every-Day Person
Despite the prophecies, then, Cox had not succeeded in a big way. He who was to travel in seven-league boots to the Land of Success was shod in the rather flimsy leather of the cheap shoestore. What had happened?
My curiosity was now too much for me. I spoke up.
"Well, Cox, it's been a long time since we put it over the professors!"
He was warm in his greeting, and immediately wanted to know how I had fared. I was pleased to find him the same unselfish individual whom we had liked even in our hours of most intense student rivalry.
I quickly swung the talk in his direction. "In business for yourself?" I asked.
"Not just now," he said. But it appeared that at one time or another he had ventured out on his own hook. He had tried publishing books, because that seemed a dignified pursuit, and because he loved the association of books. But the cheap, shoddy, illegitimate offsprings of whirling presses soon lost interest for him.
"When I found there wasn't enough money in it, there was no use keeping it up," he explained. "There was nothing to compensate me for my loss of self-respect."
The book business, however, showed him the possibilities of mail-order selling. In this he embarked with another man who put a whole life's savings into it. They tried to market numberless things.
"We worked day and night," he said. "In fact, we almost worked ourselves to death. We consumed enough brains and enough muscle to have kept a business five hundred times that size on the go if we'd only had the capital. But we couldn't compete with the fellows who had twenty years' start of us."
After that, not at all discouraged, he concentrated on salesmanship: "The scientific kind. None of this half-baked conversation by which nine-tenths of the solicitors prod some business out of a harrassed man."
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