and some one else should work for him, not Kurt Lieders, BEGEHR!

Young Lossing had learned the business practically.
He was taught the details by his father's best workman;
and a mighty hard and strict master the best workman proved!
Lossing did not dream that the crabbed old tyrant who rarely
praised him, who made him go over, for the twentieth time,
any imperfect piece of work, who exacted all the artisan
virtues to the last inch, was secretly proud of him.
Yet, in fact, the thread of romance in Lieders's prosaic
life was his idolatry of the Lossing Manufacturing Co.
It is hard to tell whether it was the Lossings or that
intangible quantity, the firm, the business, that he worshipped.
Worship he did, however, the one or the other, perhaps the both
of them, though in the peevish and erratic manner of the savage
who sometimes grovels to his idols and sometimes kicks them.

Nobody guessed what a blow it was to Kurt when, a year ago,
the elder Lossing had died. Even his wife did not connect
his sullen melancholy and his gibes at the younger generation,
with the crape on Harry Lossing's hat. He would not go to
the funeral, but worked savagely, all alone by himself, in the shop,
the whole afternoon--breaking down at last at the sight of a carved
panel over which Lossing and he had once disputed. The desolate
loneliness of the old came to him when his old master was gone.
He loved the young man, but the old man was of his own generation;
he had "known how things ought to be and he could understand
without talking." Lieders began to be on the lookout for signs
of waning consideration, to watch his own eyes and hands,
drearily wondering when they would begin to play him false;