lacing shoes and carrying books to and from shelves. In this lay one of
the important secrets of his success. "Never do for yourself what you
can get some one else to do for you as well. Save yourself for the
things only _you_ can do."

In his household there were three persons, and sixteen servants to wait
upon them. His sister--she and her husband, Clayton Fitzhugh, were the
other two persons--his sister was always complaining that there were not
enough servants, and Frederick, the most indulgent of brothers, was
always letting her add to the number. It seemed to him that the more
help there was, the less smoothly the household ran. But that did not
concern him; his mind was saved for more important matters. There was no
reason why it should concern him; could he not compel the dollars to
flood in faster than she could bail them out?

This brother and sister had come to New York fifteen years before, when
he was twenty-two and she nineteen. They were from Albany, where their
family had possessed some wealth and much social position for many
generations. There was the usual "queer streak" in the Norman family--an
intermittent but fixed habit of some one of them making a "low
marriage." One view of this aberration might have been that there was in
the Norman blood a tenacious instinct of sturdy and self-respecting
independence that caused a Norman occasionally to do as he pleased
instead of as he conventionally ought. Each time the thing occurred
there was a mighty and horrified hubbub throughout the connection. But
in the broad, as the custom is, the Normans were complacent about the
"queer streak." They thought it kept the family from rotting out and
running to seed. "Nothing like an occasional infusion of common blood,"
Aunt Ursula Van Bruyten (born Norman) used to say. For her Norman's
sister was named.