"So can I," she said cheerfully. "But so long as you like it, that's all there is to be said. You're the one who has to live in it, you know. Now my father likes a room——"
And while I looked gloomily over the water she told me what her father liked.
He came out from the city each evening by train. He refused to use the boat these days, he said he was so infernally busy that he could not spare the time. He brought out stacks of papers and plans which had piled up while he was abroad, and with these he busied himself at night. And though Eleanore from the veranda glanced in at him frequently, she never again caught him looking old. And when she went in to make him stop working he smilingly told her to leave him alone. He smoked many cigars with apparent enjoyment, his lean face wrinkling over the smoke as he turned over plan after plan for the harbor. His manner to me was if anything even kindlier than before. He began calling me "Billy" now.
On the last night of my stay he said:
"I think you're the man I've been looking for. I've just read your story and you've done exactly what I hoped. You've pictured one spot of efficiency in a whole dreary desert of waste. Come up to my office to-morrow at ten."
CHAPTER XV
So at last I went up to the tower.
His office took up an entire floor near the tapering top of the building, and as we walked slowly around the narrow steel balcony outside, a tremendous panorama unrolled down there before our eyes. We could see every part of the port below stretching away to the horizon, and through Dillon's powerful field glass I saw pictures of all I had seen before in my weary weeks of trudging down there in the haze and dust. Down there I had felt like a little worm, up here I felt among the gods. There all had been matter and chaos, here all was mind and a will to find a way out of confusion. The glass gave me the pictures in swift succession, in a moment I made a leap of ten miles, and as I listened on and on to the quiet voice at my elbow, the pictures all came sweeping together as parts of one colossal whole. The first social vision of my life I had through Dillon's field glass.