Marvin silently held up his left hand.
“That,” said Grein, “would make no difference in the office.”
“Thank you for saying so, but I’m on my way home to be married, and my wife will need money. That is to say, she won’t, but I shall need my self-respect. Grein, don’t you need a wife?”
“No,” said Grein, once more master of himself, and continued to gaze at the tomb.
It was a hundred and fifty feet high, and ponderous as a pyramid. Within it was a great block of red porphyry, and within that a lead coffin, and within the coffin some clothes and calcium. But the granite around and above all this was not granite; it was a massive will. Sometimes Grein had thought of it as the triumph of northern industry over southern agriculture, but this morning it meant just one thing—that he must fight it out on this line if it took all summer. There must be a way to end not merely one war but all wars.
Chapter 22. Titanium
A morning or two later the shadow called Marvin reached Chicago. Millions remember how it was in their own homes. Sometimes the whole boy came, sometimes only his shadow, sometimes only a long box. But there was always welcome.
He spent the afternoon lying flat on his back, while father and mother and Anita hovered around for fear his heart would stop beating unless they watched. They brought the telephone to his side and let Augustus talk to him from Duluth. They brought it again and let Charles talk to him from California.
And then after dinner he gave them all the slip—all except his mother. She knew she could not stop him, and so she gave him his latch key, and kissed him, and wished him good luck. An hour later he was in a north shore suburb called Wetumpka.
A taxicab set off with him through a wilderness of private parks and arrived before a lofty pair of wrought iron gates, through which they were admitted by a porter who eyed them narrowly. There was a long winding approach to the house, which was an immense thing, copied after old Moyn’s Park, in Essex.