During his nine months’ isolation at Coulee du Sac, David had met the Vallory benefactor only a few times; and the benefactor’s daughter not at all. For the lack of the social opportunity he was grateful rather than sorry. In the light of the Judith Fallon tragedy he was beginning to question his right to make love to Virginia Grillage, even if the magic circle could be broken into; or if not to question the right, to realize the immense and humiliating barrier which must always exist between a man with a tragedy in his past and a woman to whom that past should be as a pane of glass. And the height of the barrier was not lessened by the thought that, in the last analysis, he was culpable only to the extent of having been bat-blind to the temperamental abysses yawning for the Judith Fallons. A great love might condone the blindness, but no pure-minded woman could ever be made to believe that it was total.
As to Virginia’s whereabouts during the three-quarters of a year, David had learned something from Eben Grillage, himself. She had spent the summer with a party of friends in the Rockies—the farther Rockies—touring and resting at a small resort hotel known only to the elect; she had spent the shooting season with other friends in the Adirondacks; and she had gone to Florida late in the season to escape the Northern winter.
So much for the slightly wider horizons. In the working-day field, David had been given the most convincing proof that he had not been merely placed and forgotten. There had been offerings of ample opportunity to show what was in him, with pay-roll advances to fit; and on a March day when Grimsby, the saturnine chief of construction, called him into the bridge office for a conference, he was given fresh assurances that he had been accepted as a post-graduate member of the staff.
“You are a rising young man in the profession, Vallory, and if you keep on as you’ve begun, you’ll come out at the top of the heap,” was the complimentary phrase with which the conference began. “You are not like most of the young fellows I’ve had to hammer into shape; you don’t go around firing off the proposition that you know it all.”
“I should hope not,” said David. “That sort of thing is the best possible evidence that a man needs to go to school again.”
“Meaning that we’re all learning all the time?—that’s the idea, exactly,” said the chief brusquely. “Take it in the use—the modern use—of reinforced concrete, for example: we are all children going to school in that field. What we don’t know about it would fill a library.”
“You are right,” David admitted. “I’m learning something new about it every day.”
“And just because we are still in the apprentice stage, I imagine we go pretty wide on the side of safety,” Grimsby went on. “That’s natural; we’re afraid to take our own figures after we’ve made them. Now this ‘mix’ we’re using on this bridge; I’ll venture the cement content could be cut down twenty per cent and still leave an ample margin of safety. What?” Then, with an abrupt break: “Sit down and have a cigar.”
David found a three-legged stool and nodded acquiescence to the general postulate that the use of concrete as a substitute for masonry was as yet but a babe in arms.
“The quality of the cement is another disputed point,” Grimsby argued. “There isn’t the least doubt in my mind that we are altogether too finical about that. We’ve set up a code of theoretical standards; such and such a degree of fineness, such and such a chemical analysis, and all that; and yet, after the job’s done, you can’t tell where the tested stuff ends and the untested begins. Isn’t that so?”