I took him up to my factory and showed him about. He was lavish in his expressions of surprise at the magnitude of my concern, and when I asked him to have dinner with me that evening he seemed to be more than pleased. Apart from other feelings, he was probably glad to renew acquaintance with a man who could afford to pay a decent doctor's bill, and through whom he might get in touch with other desirable patrons
Presently he wrinkled his forehead, as though he had suddenly remembered something
"Oh! Let me see!" he said. "Couldn't we postpone it? I have a confinement this evening. I expect to be called at any moment."
We changed the date, and he departed. I was left somewhat excited by the reminiscences that the meeting had evoked in me. I fell to pacing the floor of my office, ruminating upon the change which the past few years had wrought in his life and in mine. His boastful garrulity was something new in him. Was it the struggle for existence which was forcing it upon him? I wondered whether that confinement story was not a fib invented to flaunt his professional success. Thereupon I gave myself credit for my knowledge of human nature. "That's one of the secrets of my success," I thought. I complimented myself upon the possession of all sorts of talents, but my keenest ambition was to be recognized as an unerring judge of men
The amusing part of it was that in 1894, for example, I found that in 1893 my judgment of men and things had been immature and puerile. I was convinced that now at last my insight was a thoroughly reliable instrurnent, only a year later to look back upon my opinions of 1894 with contempt. I was everlastingly revising my views of people, including my own self
BOOK XI
MATRIMONY
CHAPTER I
ONE afternoon in January or February I was on a Lexington Avenue car going up-town. At Sixty-seventh Street the car was invaded by a vivacious crowd of young girls, each with a stack of books under one of her arms. It was evident that they were returning home from Normal College, which was on that corner. Some of them preferred to stand, holding on to straps, so as to face and converse with their seated chums
I was watching them as they chattered, laughed, or whispered, bubbling over with the joy of being young and with the consciousness of their budding womanhood, when my attention was attracted to one of their number—a tall, lanky, long-necked lass of fifteen or sixteen. She was hanging on to a strap directly across the car from me. I could not see her face, but the shape of her head and a certain jerk of it, when she laughed, looked strikingly familiar to me. Presently she chanced to turn half-way around, and I recognized her. It was Lucy. I had not seen her for six years. She was completely changed and yet the same. Not yet fully formed, elongated, attenuated, angular, ridiculously too tall for her looks, and not quite so pretty as she had been at nine or ten, but overflowing with color, with light, with blossoming life, she thrilled me almost to tears. I was aching to call out her name, to hear myself say "Lucy" as I had once been wont to do, but I was not sure that it would be advisable to let her father hear of my lingering interest in his family. While I was thus debating with myself whether I should accost her, her glance fell on me. She transferred it to one of the windows, and the next moment she fell to eying me furtively.