“Am I to congratulate you?”
“Yes! We’re not going to get married.”
Chapter 24. Chromium
Kate looked at them and did not quite believe it. This was just their merry way of putting off their marriage until Marvin had established himself, so as not to be dependent on his father or on Gratia’s. Kate had fostered this mating, and took pride in it, and had it all settled in her mind. So she laughed and said she’d wait and see.
Marvin however did not wait for dinner or to see the frock of Veronese green, but tried to heat the chromium out of his ball bearings as he shot back to Wickford. He exulted all the way to New York and went to bed exulting.
Next morning on the Pennsylvania road his elation had cooled down a bit. He was completely depolarized from Gratia, but the reaction was not wholly pleasant. In the first place, the loss of his hand had evidently made a difference. That polite “Not much” of hers concealed a certain physical shrinking and a certain unwillingness to spend a lifetime in tying cravats. Perhaps he had no right to ask any woman to share his mutilated life. In the second place, he felt lost. There was nothing now to prevent him from going to the dogs—nothing to prevent him from indulging his passions and palliating them with the name of nature.
The train reached Philadelphia, where once was signed the only treaty between savages and Christians not ratified by an oath—and the only one, if we may believe Voltaire, never broken by Christians. But though little was left of Penn’s dream of peace, Marvin remembered gratefully the Quakers in their war work. They had not sent their passions on God’s errands or palliated them with God’s name.
The train passed on into Pennsylvania, a great and stately volume of natural things in which Penn had desired youth to read. And this youth read a little. To the south and west lay Gettysburg, where a great issue had been fought out. He was not quite sure what the issue was, but it had been very real to his grandfather.
To the south, beyond those hills green as chromium oxide and viridian, lay chromite in the rocks and the streams. There was even a town called Chrome, and he wondered if instead of importing chromite from Africa the steel men were not reviving the old industry. It had taken them two centuries to perceive either the tensile strength of chromium or the intense hardness which pierces armor plate.
Could steel heal the wounds of steel? He had asked himself the question a thousand times, and always with the same answer—yes. Given cheap power instead of this anthracite over which men quarreled and under which they died untimely, machinery would so increase wealth that wars would cease. If all the present wealth were distributed and miraculously kept distributed, it would not raise the standard of life ten percent. But let a hidden nobody in a laboratory discover one new electronic fact—for instance about the emissions from a heated metal—and everybody was presently enriched.