“He’s all puffed up over it,” Fred said, with a laugh.
Roper was applying himself to a steak. He lifted his face and said, “Whistler, did you say?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a new car on me. Where’s it made?”
“The production is very small,” said Fred, without a smile. “Mostly they come from Europe.”
That represented one phase of Detroit, the part of it which had grown so rapidly it had shot past certain stations on the way without so much as a knowledge of their existence. It was producing lopsided men. Roper did not know Whistler, probably had never heard of Meredith, was too busy to understand or care that his speech was crude, sometimes vulgar, always studded with solecisms; yet a great motor company found his knowledge of production in bulk such that it gladly paid him twenty-five thousand dollars a year for the use of it.
“Supposing,” said the major, “that we should need this twenty-five thousand aeroplanes next year. If events should shape themselves so that we were drawn into the war in the spring, how long would it be before we could hope for deliveries?”
“I imagine you are better equipped to answer that than I,” said Potter. “A great deal depends on the start. If a motor were adopted and orders given now, we could probably begin making deliveries in six or seven months—if we were assured the material and the labor—and if factories could be found to equip for their manufacture?”
“Have you any doubts of that?”
“I’ve estimated that the initial cost of equipping my father’s plant to make engines alone will be upward of half a million dollars,” Potter said. “I don’t know how he would feel about going ahead to that extent. Six months ago I would have said he would never consider it. Now I rather believe he would.... Some manufacturers here would jump at the opportunity—from patriotic motives—without a thought of profit. Others would have to be shown where the profit was.”