Read "The Prodigal Parents" by Sinclair Lewis online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Frederick William Cornplow was in his office, at the Triumph agency, and he was busy. He had perceived that it was time to add an agency for trailers to his business, and he had sent his foreman and assistant manager, Paul Popple, out to Chicago to look into the matter of the Duplex Trailer, a new make, only just now in production but promising well.
That left Fred shorthanded. He had no one to sell cars except salesmen, and they had one fault: they could not endure just selling a car; they had to go through their little pieces about the Triumph which, with such agony, they had learned from Fred, and if a customer should attempt to buy a car off the floor, without letting the salesman lift the bonnet and point out that those funny jiggers there were the spark plugs, the salesman would go to pieces.