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have a foreign department which could take great pains about letters of credit and perhaps advance allowances to depositors’ grandchildren overextended while traveling on the Continent. It paid to have kindly tax experts seemingly willing to waste hours over minor problems of bewildered clients.
    Other banks, larger ones, were constantly advertising their friendly services and pointing out the almost insoluble personal complications faced by anyone who owned property in this period of economic change and regulation, but the Stuyvesant seldom advertised. It was a matter of deeds rather than words at the Stuyvesant, and it paid. The wills of deceased depositors were proof enough that the Stuyvesant had been an institutional friend through life. The Stuyvesant had been named as executor and trustee in hundreds of wills. The employees of the Stuyvesant understood rich clients and knew all the pains and drawbacks of being rich, although they were not rich men themselves. They had to deal familiarly, almost jovially, but always scrupulously with large sums of money, while living usually on modest salaries.
    If you were successful at the Stuyvesant you ended by developing a priestly, untouchable, ascetic attitude. You learned to think of your own financial life and your own problems as something apart from those other financial complications. If you did well enough to become an executive in the Stuyvesant, and this required a long time and an arduous apprenticeship, you found yourself solving the problems of individuals who had difficulty living within incomes approaching a hundred thousand dollars a year. You found yourself spending the working day discussing the investment of huge sums of money, only to get home yourself and to worry because the butcher’s bill had risen some twenty dollars above the previous one. You had to debate the purchase or the sale of controls in business enterprises and then return home yourself to decide whether or not you could afford to buy a motor lawn mower, or a ready-made or a tailor-made suit. In time this gave you a split personality since you had to toss your own problems completely aside and never allow them to mingle in any way with those of clients and depositors when you reached your desk at the Stuyvesant. At your desk you had to be a friend and confidant, as professional as a doctor or a lawyer, ready and with an intelligent perspective for almost anything. Anthony Burton had once said that this attitude was one’s responsibility toward society. Though personally Charles had never felt like a social worker, he felt this responsibility. He was already forgetting Nancy and the children, already assuming his business character, when he said good morning to Gus, the doorman on the sidewalk outside the Stuyvesant.
    â€œIs it wet enough for you, Mr. Gray?” Gus asked.
    â€œIt has to rain sometime,” Charles said. “Are you a grandfather yet?”
    â€œNo, not yet,” Gus said, “but any minute now.”
    Then Charles said good morning to Joe inside the door. The bank was scrupulously neat and cleared for action. He could hear the click of the adding machines in back and he could see the new pens and blotters on the depositors’ tables as he walked past the tellers behind their gilded wickets and turned to the right past the foreign department to the coat-room. When he had hung up his coat and hat, he looked at himself in the mirror. Though his herringbone suit was a little tight, it was adequate, and he automatically straightened the coat and adjusted his tie. His slightly freckled face was moist from the rain and his sandy hair, though it was carefully trimmed, needed brushing, so he went to the washroom. He had learned long ago that you did not neglect exterior details when you sat out near the vice-presidents’ desks by the front window.
    Though you seldom talked of salaries at the Stuyvesant, your social status was obvious from the position of