"An efficiency expert doesn't know everything. He studies nothing but the individual private, whereas a political economist knows what's going on all up and down the line."
To Collingham this was like the doctrine of universal salvation to a Calvinist theologian. He would have seized it had he dared, but for daring it was too late. He had trained himself otherwise. On a basis of expert advice and individual efficiency Collingham & Law's had been built up. All he could do was to grasp at the personal.
"Where did you hear that?"
"You can read all about it in Mr. Ayling's last book, The Economic Value of Good Will."
As she passed through the French window into the house, her mother turned with a gesture of both outspread hands.
"There! You see! What did I tell you? She has the effrontery to read his books and name him openly."
But too dispirited to take up the gauntlet, Collingham looked, with welcome, toward Gossip, who appeared in the doorway with the tea.
[CHAPTER IV]
The Folletts came together every evening about six, chiefly by the process known to American cities as commuting. Commuting brought them to Number Eleven Indiana Avenue, Pemberton Heights. Seen from the New York river-front, Pemberton Heights, on top of a great cliff on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, suggests a battlemented parapet. By day, its outline is a fringe against the sky; by night, its clustering lights are like a constellation.
Indiana Avenue is one of those rare spots in the neighborhood of New York where a measure of beauty is still reserved for the relatively poor. The heights are too high for the railways to scale, too inconvenient for factories. The not-very-well-to-do can find shelter there, as the mediæval peoples of the Mediterranean coast found it in the rock towns where the pirates couldn't follow them. It is hardly conceivable that industry will ever climb to this uncomfortable perch, or that much competition will put up rents. Too inaccessible for the social rich, and too isolated for the still more social poor, Pemberton Heights is the refuge of those who don't mind the trouble of getting there for the sake of the compensation.