"Nothing," he said, drawing a breath. "You can't help being what you are. Really, Doris, in the whole room you're the loveliest here. No one has your style or a smile as bewitching as yours. There is a fascination about you."

She was only half rea.s.sured.

"Well, then, don't talk so idiotically."

"Idiotic is exactly the word," he said with a laugh, and the compliments he had paid her in a spirit of self-raillery awakened a little feeling of tenderness after his teasing had shown him that, according to her lights, she cared more than he had thought.

All the same when he rose to hurry downtown, he was under no illusions: if opportunity permitted him to fit into the social scheme of things, well and good; if not-- His thoughts recurred to Fred DeLancy's words:

"There are three ways of making money: to have it left to you, to earn it, and to marry it."

He broke off angrily, troubled with doubts, and for the hundredth time he found himself asking:

"Now why the deuce can't I be mad in love with a girl who cares for me, who's a beauty and has everything in the world! What is it?"

For he had once been very much in love when he was a schoolboy and Doris had been just a schoolgirl, with open eyes and impulsive direct ways, like a certain young lady, with breathless, laughing lips who had come sliding into his life on the comical tail of a scampering terrier.

CHAPTER IV

BOJO'S FATHER

The offices of the a.s.sociated Woolen Mills were on the sixteenth floor of a modern office building in the lower city, which towered above the surrounding squalid brownstone houses given over to pedlers and delicatessen shops like a gleaming stork ankle deep in a pool of murky water.

Bojo wandered through long mathematical rooms with mathematical young men perched high on desk stools all with the same mathematical curve of the back, past squadrons of clicking typewriters, clicking endlessly as though each human unit had been surrendered into the cogs of a universal machine. He pa.s.sed one by one a row of gla.s.sed-in rooms with names of minor officers displayed, marking them solemnly as though already he saw the long slow future ahead: Mr. Pelton, treasurer; Mr. Spinny, general secretary; Mr. Colton, second vice-president; Mr. Horton, vice-president; Mr. Rhoemer, general manager, until he arrived at the outer waiting-room with its faded red leather sofas and polished bra.s.s spittoons, where he had come first as a boy in need of money.

Richardson, an old young man, who walked as though he had never been in a hurry and spoke in a whisper, showed him into the inner office of Jotham B. Crocker, explaining that his father would return presently.

Everything was in order; chairs precisely placed, the window shades at the same level, bookcases with filed memoranda, even to the desk, where letters to be read and letters to be signed were arranged in neat packages side by side.

On the wall was extended an immense oil painting fifteen feet by ten, of Niagara Falls in frothy eruption, with a large and brilliant rainbow lost in the mist and several figures in the foreground representing the n.o.ble Indians gazing with feelings of awe upon the spectacle of nature.

Behind the desk hung a large black and white engraving of Abraham Lincoln, with one hand resting on the Proclamation of Emanc.i.p.ation, flanked by smaller portraits of Henry Ward Beecher and the author of the McKinley tariff. Opposite was an old-time family group done in crayons, representing Mr. and Mrs. Crocker standing side by side, with Jack in long trousers and Tom in short, while on the shining desk amid the papers was a daguerrotype mounted in a worn leather frame, of the wife who had been dead fifteen years.

Bojo selected a cigar from the visitors box and strode up and down, rehearsing in his mind the arguments he would bring to bear against the expected ultimatum. From the window the lower bay expanded below him with its steam insects crawling across the blue-gray surface, its wharf-crowded sh.o.r.es, beyond the ledges on ledges of factories trailing cotton streamers against the brittle sky. Everywhere the empire of industry extended its stone barracks without loveliness or pomp, smoke-grimed, implacable prisons, where mult.i.tudes herded under artificial light that humanity might live in terms of millions.

As he looked, he seemed already to have surrendered his individuality, swallowed up in the army of labor, and the revolt arose in him anew.

What was the use of money if it could not bring a wider horizon and greater opportunities? And a sort of dull anger moved in him against the parental ambition which limited him to unnecessary drudgery.

Of all the persons he had met the greatest stranger to him was his father. Since his mother's death, when he was but eight years of age, his life had been spent in boarding school and college, in summer camps or on visits to chums. Their relations had been formal. At the beginning and end of each summer he had come down the long avenue of desks, past the gla.s.s doors into the private office, to report, to receive money, and to be sped with a few appropriate words of advice. Several times during the year his father would appear on a short warning, stay a few hours, and hurry off. On such occasions Tom had always felt that he was being surveyed and estimated as a lumberman watches the growth of a young forest.

His father was always in a hurry, always in good health, matter of fact, and generous. That his business had prospered and extended he knew, though to what extent his father's activities had multiplied he still was ignorant. Conversation between them had always been difficult in those tours of inspection; but Bojo, instinctively, censored the lithographs on the wall (harmless though they were) and the choice of novels which his father would be sure to examine with a critical eye.

Klondike, the sweep, arranged the room in military order and Fred DeLancy was enjoined to observe a bread-and-milk diet. Bojo had an idea that his father was very stern, rigid, and exact, with the unrelenting att.i.tude toward folly and leisure which had characterized the Crocker family in the days of their seven celebrated divines.

"How are you, Tom?" said a chest-voice behind him. "Turn around. You look in first-cla.s.s shape. Glad to see you."

"Glad to see you, father," he said hastily, taking the stubby, powerful hand.

"Just a moment--go on with your cigar. Let me straighten out this desk.

Train was ten minutes late."

"Now it comes," thought Bojo to himself as he gripped his hands and a.s.sumed a determined frown.

As they faced each other they were astonishingly alike and unlike. They had the same squaring of the brows, the same obstinate rise of the head at the back, and the prominent undershot jaw. Years had thickened the frame of the father and written characteristic lines about the mouth and the eyes. He had become so integral a part of the machine he had created that in the process all the finer youthful shades of expression had faded away.

Concentration on a fixed idea, indomitable purpose, decision, self-discipline were there in the strongly sculptured chin and maxillary muscles, under the spa.r.s.e, close-cropped beard shot with gray; courage and tenacity in the deep eyes, which, like Bojo's, had the disconcerting fixity of the mastiff's; but the quality of dreams which so keenly qualified the tempestuous obstinacy of the son had been discarded as so much superfluous baggage. Life to him was a succession of immediate necessities, a military progress, and his imagination went with difficulty beyond the demands of the hour. He dressed in a pepper-and-salt business suit made of his own product, wore a made-up tie and comfortable square-toed shoes, with a certain aggressive disdain for the fashions as a quality of pretentiousness.

He ran through his correspondence in five minutes while Bojo p.r.i.c.ked up his ears at the sums which he flung off without hesitation. Richardson faded from the room, the father shifted a package of memoranda, turned the face of his desk clock so he could follow the time, drew back in his chair, and helped himself to a cigar, shooting a glance at the embattled figure of the son.

"You look all primed up--ready to jump in the ring," he said with a smile, and without waiting for Bojo's embarra.s.sed answer he continued, caging his fingers and adopting a quick, incisive tone.

"Well, Tom, you have now arrived at man's estate and it is right that I should discuss with you your future course in life. But before we come to that I wish to say several things. You've finished your college course very creditably. You have engaged a good deal in different sports, it is true; but you have not allowed it to interfere with your serious work, and I believe on the whole your experience in athletics has been valuable. It has taught you qualities of self-restraint and discipline, and it has given you a sound body. Your record in your studies, while it has not been brilliant, has been creditable. You've kept out of bad company, chosen the right friends-- I am particularly impressed with Mr. Granning--and you've not gone in for dissipation.

You've done well and I have no complaint. You've worked hard and you've played hard. You will take a serious view of life."

This discourse annoyed Bojo. It seemed to fling a barrier of conventionality between them, driving them further apart.

"Why the deuce doesn't he talk in a natural way?" he thought moodily.

And he felt with a sudden depression the futility of arguing his case.

"We're in for a row. There's no way out."

"Now, Tom, lets talk about the future."

"Here it comes," said Bojo to himself, bracing himself to resist.

"What would you like to do?"

"What would _I_ like?" said Tom, completely off his guard.

"Yes, what are your ideas?"

The turn was so unexpected that he could not for the moment a.s.semble his thoughts. He rose, making a pretext of seeking an ash-tray, and returned.

"Why, to tell the truth, sir, I came here expecting that you would demand that I go into this--into the mills."

"I see, and you don't want to do what your father's done. You want something else, something better."

The tone in which this was said aroused the obstinacy in the young man, but he repressed the first answer.

"Well?"

"I don't know, sir, that there's any use of my explaining myself; I don't know what good it'll do," he said slowly.

"On the contrary, I am not making demands on you. I am here to discuss with you." (Bojo repressed a smile at this.) "You've thought about this.

What do you suggest?"

"I don't think you'll understand it at all, but I want time."