That is what an offer like that is for.

It is not a bribe in the way people imagine a bribe.

It is a man finding the exact size of the thing you have been going without, and putting it on a table, and waiting.

And the reason I did not take it is not character.

It is that I had been in Arthur Vance’s office eleven days earlier and I knew that there was sixty-one thousand four hundred and twenty-eight dollars in an account that my father had no authority over, and he did not know that I knew.

If I had walked into that room on the eleventh of November without having gone to the bank, I would have signed it.