Henry Champney stood at his tall library window, gazing out, and saw Hennion and Wood go up the street. “Dick must have a hundred men out there,” he said.
“Has he?” Camilla looked up from her book.
“Ha! Concentration was the military principle of Napoleon,” Champney went on. “Our energetic friend, Dick, is, in his own way, I should say, Napoleonic in action.” Camilla came to the window and took her father's arm, and stood leaning her head against his large bowed shoulder. She did not seem inclined to concentrate her thoughts on the scene in front of the P. and N. station, or the Napoleonic actions of “Dick,” but looked away at the sunlight shimmering in the thin young maple leaves, at the hurrying, glinting river, at the filmy clouds floating in the perfect blue. The lower edges of this perfect sky were a bit stained with the reek of the factory chimneys across the river; and the river, when you came to consider it, was muddy beyond all reason, and thronged with impetuous tugboats. The factory chimneys and tugboats were energetic, too, concentrated and Napoleonic in action. The tugboats had no poise or repose, but the factory chimneys had both. Their fiery energies had solid bases, and the powers within them did not carry them away. There are men, as well as steam engines, whose energies carry them bodily, and there are others who are equally energetic from a fixed basis, and the difference is important—important to the observer of the signs of the times; possibly even important to Camilla.
Camilla's thoughts had no bearing on factories and tugboats. They were more like the filmy clouds floating in the blue, beyond the stain of the spouting chimneys, and if darkened at all it was probably only as sunny clouds are sometimes darkened mysteriously by the shadows of themselves.
Hennion and Wood entered the swing-door of a business block, mounted a flight of stairs to an office where “Marvin Wood” was gilded on the ground glass of the door. The room was large, and contained a desk and an extraordinary number of comfortable chairs. A typewriter clicked in the next room. They lit cigars and sat down before the open window. The street outside was full of noises. The windows of the office building opposite were open.
“Those were Freiburger's men, you say?” remarked Hennion.
“Whole batch. It's Freiburger's wanting to get on the Council, and his boys are bothering him already for 'shobs.' Oh—well—he's all right.”
“He can get on the City Hall flagstaff and wave himself for a starry banner if he wants to.”
Wood chuckled appreciatively at the image of Freiburger in that function.
“But you'd better tell Freiburger,” continued Hennion, “that I won't stand any deadheads.”