turned a customer over to David he spoke of him as a salesman.
But David called himself a "demonstrator." For a short time he
even succeeded in persuading the other salesmen to speak of
themselves as demonstrators, but the shipping clerks and
bookkeepers laughed them out of it. They could not laugh David
out of it. This was so, partly because he had no sense of humor,
and partly because he had a great-great-grandfather. Among the
salesmen on lower Broadway, to possess a great-great-grandfather
is unusual, even a great-grandfather is a rarity, and either is
considered superfluous. But to David the possession of a
great-great-grandfather was a precious and open delight. He had
possessed him only for a short time. Undoubtedly he always had
existed, but it was not until David's sister Anne married a
doctor in Bordentown, New Jersey, and became socially ambitious,
that David emerged as a Son of Washington.

It was sister Anne, anxious to "get in" as a "Daughter" and wear
a distaff pin in her shirtwaist, who discovered the revolutionary
ancestor. She unearthed him, or rather ran him to earth, in the
graveyard of the Presbyterian church at Bordentown. He was no
less a person than General Hiram Greene, and he had fought with
Washington at Trenton and at Princeton. Of this there was no
doubt. That, later, on moving to New York, his descendants became
peace-loving salesmen did not affect his record. To enter a
society founded on heredity, the important thing is first to
catch your ancestor, and having made sure of him, David entered
the Society of the Sons of Washington with flying colors. He was
not unlike the man who had been speaking prose for forty years
without knowing it. He was not unlike the other man who woke to
find himself famous. He had gone to bed a timid, near-sighted,