"Yes, Suzanna. A result like that is worth while, eh, Richard?"
Mr. Procter did not answer, could not, because he feared at the moment that he could not speak intelligently.
The Eagle Man turned to the wife, adoringly silent as she listened.
"Three men Richard Procter brought to me on his first day in my mills. He said: 'These men have ambitions, they are greatly talented. You must give them their chance.'"
"And what did you say?" asked Mrs. Procter softly.
"Oh, I snarled as usual, but that was really the work I wanted him to do. I wanted him to do in the circumscribed field of my mills that which he had built his machine to do. And so I snapped out: 'All right, put the burden on me! I'll give them their chance just because you say so.' And where men were dissatisfied he got at them and discovered the trouble, and down there they all trust him, and his influence will be like a river flowing on, ever widening. So there's the late history of the man who stands and calls himself a failure."
So he finished, said not another word, looked once at the inventor, and then went away.
Suzanna, trying in vain that night to sleep, tossed about restlessly. Maizie, a sound sleeper, did not stir despite her sister's wakefulness. Suzanna was thinking of her father, of the Eagle Man, of The Machine.
Suddenly she lay quite still. She was remembering the day when The Machine had registered her color, a soft purple, gold tipped. How stirred her father had been when the wavering color spread itself upon the glass plate. It had repeated its marvel for Maizie and Peter. Why then when The Machine was removed and conveyed to the big steel mills, did it stand brooding, sulky, refusing to make any record of any personality. She sat up straight in bed, her eyes yearning forward into the dark. And all at once the answer came to her. Only in the attic, where, piece by piece, in prayer, hope, and jubilation it had been assembled; where love and belief had formed the atmosphere could The Machine be its own highly sensitive self, reacting and responding.