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His activities were of increasing complexity. A Stock Exchange ticker was installed, for he meant to keep his eye on the stock market; then an automatic printing device on which foreign, domestic and Wall Street news bulletins were flashed by telegraph; then a private switchboard and a number of direct telephones,—one with the house of Mordecai & Co., one with the operating department at Chicago, one with the office of Jonas Gates, several with Stock Exchange brokers and others designated by code letters the terminals of which were his own secret. He worked by no schedule, hated to make fixed appointments, and took people as they came. They waited in the reception room, which of necessity became his ante-chamber. In a little while it was crowded with those who asked for Galt, Galt, Galt. Not one in twenty who entered asked for Valentine, the president. A mixed procession it was,—engineers, equipment makers, brokers, speculators, inventors, contractors and persons summoned suddenly out of the sky whose business one never knew. Never wasting it himself, never permitting anyone else to waste it, he had time for everything. He received impressions whole and instantaneously. With people he was abrupt, often rude. He wanted the point first. If a man with whom he meant to do business insisted upon talking beside the point he would say: “Go outside to make your speech and then come back.” He never read a newspaper. He looked at it, sniffed, crumpled it up and cast it from him, all with one gesture. Four or five times a day he ran a yard or two of ticker tape through his fingers and glanced in passing at the news printing machine. Magazines and books were non-existent matter. Yet within the area of his own purposes no fact, no implication of fact, was ever lost.
Meanwhile Great Midwestern stock was slowly rising. One effect of this was to relieve the tension in the Galt household. Gram’ma Galt’s daily question was no longer dreaded.
Having asked it in the usual way at the end of dinner one evening, and Galt having told her the price, she electrified us all by addressing some remarks to me.
“You are with my son a good deal of the time?”
“All day,” I said.
I was looking at her. She frowned a little before speaking, wetted her lips with her tongue, and spoke precisely, in the level, slightly deaf and utterly detached way of old people.
“Do you see that he gets a hot lunch every day?”
“I have never attended to that,” I said.
“Does he, though?” she asked.
“We’ve been very careless about it,” I said. “Sometimes when he’s busy he doesn’t get any.”
“Please see that he gets a hot lunch every day,” she said. “Cold victuals are not good for him. And tea if he will drink it.”
I promised. An embarrassed silence followed. She was not quite through.
“Have you any Great Midwestern stock?” she asked.
“I have a small amount.”
“You must believe in it,” she said, adding after a pause: “We do.”
Then she was through.
Had she alone in that household always believed in Great Midwestern stock, which was to believe in him? Or had she only of a sudden become hopeful? Was it perhaps a flash of premonition, some slight exercise of the power possessed by her son? Long afterward I tried to find out. She shook her head and seemed not to understand what I was talking about. She had forgotten the incident.
The next day I ordered a hot lunch to be sent in and put upon Galt’s desk. He said, “Huh!” But he was not displeased, and ate it. And this became thereafter a fixed habit.