"The railroads can afford it. They lose no chance to gouge the manufacturers. It's like taxes. The government knows that everybody is going to dodge them, and so it allows for it. Nobody is deceived, and nobody is the worse for it. Human nature is what it is, and you can't change it."
"Does the traffic manager have to classify the exports?" Quin asked.
"Certainly; that and routing the cars is his principal business. It's a difficult and responsible position in many ways, and I have my doubts about your being able to fill it."
"I can fill it all right," said Quin, as confidently as before, but with a certain loss of enthusiasm. Upon the shining brows of his great opportunity he had spied the incipient horns of a dilemma.
For the next two hours Mr. Bangs explained in detail the duties of the new position, going into each phase of the matter with such efficient thoroughness that Quin forgot his scruples in his absorbed interest in the recital. It was no wonder, he said to himself, that Mr. Bangs was one of the most successful manufacturers in the South. A man who was not only an executive and administrator, but who could make with his own hands the most complicated farming implement in his factory, was one to command respect. Even if he did not like him personally, it was a great thing to work under him, to have his approval, to be trusted by him.
When Quin went up to his room at eleven o'clock, his head was whirling with statistics and other newly acquired facts, which he spent an hour recording in his note-book.
It was not until he went to bed and lay staring into the darkness that the mental tumult subsided and the moral tumult began. The questions that he had resolutely kept in abeyance all evening began to dance in impish insistence before him. What right had he to take Shields's place, when he had said exactly the things that Shields had been fired for saying? Did he want to go the way Shields had gone, compromising with his conscience in order to keep his job, ashamed to face his fellow man, cringing, remorseful, unhappy?
Then Mr. Bangs's arguments came back to him, specious, practical, convincing. Business was like politics; you could keep out if you didn't like it, but if you went in you must play the game as others played it or lose out. Five hundred a month! Why, a fellow wouldn't be ashamed to ask even a rich girl to marry him on that! The thought was balm to his pride.
As he lay there thinking, he was conscious of a disturbing sound in the adjoining room, and he lifted his head to listen. It sounded like some one crying—not a violent outburst, but the hopeless, steady sobbing of despair. His thoughts flew back to that blue scarf on the porch, to the inquiry about an extra seat at the table. They were true, then, those rumors about the lonely, unhappy woman whom Mr. Bangs had kept a virtual prisoner for years. Quin wondered if she was young, if she was pretty. A fierce sympathy for her seized him as he listened to her sobs on the other side of the wall. What a beast a man was to put a woman in a position like that!
His wrath, thus kindled, threw Mr. Bangs's other characteristics into startling relief. He saw him at the head of his firm, hated and despised by every employee. He saw him deceiving Madam Bartlett, sneering at Mr. Ranny's efforts at reform, terrorizing little Miss Leaks. Then he had a swift and relentless vision of himself in his new position, a well trained automaton, expected to execute Mr. Bangs's orders not only in the factory but in the Bartlett household as well.