"I think I can't print it." He still smiled.
"Naturally not. But what do you think? If you yourself were responsible to several hundred stockholders, what would you do? Risk a strike that might wipe out their dividends? Or would you resort to bribery"—his smile slowly deepened—"which is a penal offense in this State?"
I found such questions cropping up almost everywhere I went. In their dealings with the public and still more with their rivals, there was a ruthless vigor that swept old-fashioned maxims aside. And I liked this, for it got things done! I was bored to find, as I often did, these men in their homes quite old-fashioned again to suit sober old wives who still went to church. I remember one such elderly lady and the shock I unwittingly gave her. She had deplored the decline of churches; her own, she said, was barely half full. And I then tried to cheer her by an account of my last story, which was of an advertising man, a genius who in the last two years had made churches his especial line and by his up-to-date methods had packed church after church on a commission basis. Her burst of disapproval almost drove me from the house. And there were so many homes like that. Men who were perfect giants by day would become the gentlest babies at night, allowing their wives to read to them such sentimental drivel as would have been kicked from the office by day.
"But God knows they need such vacuous homes," I reflected, "to rest in."
I had never dreamed before how strenuous men's lives could be. One day in the New York office of a big plunger in real estate I pointed to a map on the wall.
"What are all those lots marked 'vacant' for?" I asked him. "I never saw many vacant lots in that part of town." He grinned cheerfully.
"Anything under four stories is vacant to us," he answered, "because it pays to buy it, tear it down and build something higher."
That was the way they crowded their cities, and as with their cities, so with their lives. One story that interested me most was of the weird America which a renowned nerve specialist knew. To him came these men broken down, some on the verge of insanity. He gave me stories of their lives, of his glimpses into their straining minds, he described their pathetic efforts to rest, their strenuous attempts to relax. He himself had some mysterious ailment, his hands kept trembling while he talked. His wife said he hadn't had a vacation of over a week in eleven years.
From such men I would turn to exuberant lives, like that of the Tammany leader now dead, who gave a ten-thousand-dollar banquet one night, in the Ten Eyck in Albany, in honor of the newsboy who every morning for twenty-two winters had brought morning papers to him in bed in his hotel room. Or like that of the millionaire merchant who told me with the most naïve pride of the eleven hundred electric lights in his new home on Fifth Avenue, and of how the bathrooms of both his large daughters were fitted in solid silver throughout.
"Not plated, understand," he said. "I told the architect while he was at it to put in the real solid stuff—and plenty of it!"