of Eugene’s lot and, after a mighty struggle, the boy had renounced the pony, in a scrawled message to Elfland, in favor of the cripple. Eugene never forgot: even when he had reached manhood the deception of “Little Jimmy” returned to him, without rancor, without ugliness, only with pain for all the blind waste, the stupid perjury, the thoughtless dishonor, the crippling dull deceit.
Luke parroted all of his father’s sermons, but earnestly and witlessly, without Gant’s humor, without his chicanery, only with his sentimentality. He lived in a world of symbols, large, crude, and gaudily painted, labelled “Father,” “Mother,” “Home,” “Family,” “Generosity,” “Honor,” “Unselfishness,” made of sugar and molasses, and gummed glutinously with tear-shaped syrup.
“He’s one good boy,” the neighbors said.
“He’s the cutest thing,” said the ladies, who were charmed by his stutter, his wit, his good nature, his devout attendance on them.
“That boy’s a hustler. He’ll make his mark,” said all the men in town.
And it was as the smiling hustler that he wanted to be known. He read piously all the circulars the Curtis Publishing Company sent to its agents: he posed himself in the various descriptive attitudes that were supposed to promote business—the proper manner of “approach,” the most persuasive manner of drawing the journal from the bag, the animated description of its contents, in which he was supposed to be steeped as a result of his faithful reading— “the good salesman,” the circulars said, “should know in and out the article he is selling”—a knowledge that Luke avoided, but which he replaced with eloquent invention of his own.
The literal digestion of these instructions resulted in one of the most fantastical exhibitions of print-vending ever seen: fortified by his own unlimited cheek, and by the pious axioms of the exhortations that “the good salesman will never take no for his answer,” that he should “stick to his prospect” even if rebuffed, that he should “try to get the customer’s psychology,” the boy would fall into step with an unsuspecting pedestrian, open the broad
