“Why? Do you think I am going to elope with you?” She says it with a slight contemptuous smile; and he is silent.
They come to the Long Island shore; and she rattles up the hill and drives familiarly through some narrow, squalid streets, where the air is not pleasant to breathe and the dank entries of the close brick houses swarm with half-naked children.
Ahead of them now is the group of high chimneys and great tanks of rusty iron; the scorching sky is a veil of brick-red smoke, chemical, unnatural in color. The stench of oil is almost overpowering; but Flossie drives rapidly into the gate as if it were her own park avenue at La Lisière.
“Why have you come in here?” says Caryl Wemyss at last, looking, for the once, surprised. Mrs. Gower has dropped the reins, and seems suddenly listless.
“It was my favorite playground when I was a girl,” she answers, finally. “It was a whim of mine to see the place again. Perhaps you did not know that here we made our money?”
Wemyss struggles with some speech about his indifference to the birthplace of the rose he wears; but Flossie is not hearing him; her eyes wander over the arid, unsightly factory-yard, the blue pyramids of barrels, and up to the tramways high in the air, and the masts of the iron ships.
“Come,” she says; “give the reins to that man there.”
Wemyss does as he is bid, and leaves the man with a silver dollar, wondering; and, wondering no less himself, he follows Flossie through the iron maze she seems to know so well.
They go up the foul ladder to the summit of the great storage-tank, Wemyss caring for his fine overcoat, and almost sickened with the heavy smell of the crude petroleum, while Flossie’s delicate nostrils dilate as she breathes it in once more. She guides him to the “tail-house,” where the first run of naphtha has just begun, mobile, metallic, with its evil shine. Flossie looks at it closely, and notes, with an adept’s eye, the hour of the run. A few hours more and it will be standard, water-white, as she has made herself; but she with gold, not tested yet with fire. Then she takes him to the spraying-house, where the tested oil lies lazily, girdled by the sun with brilliant rings, fair to look upon as any sylvan spring. This finest oil shall burn in quiet household lamps; it is the naphtha, surface oil, that flies to gas and fire.
Mrs. Gower was obstinately silent, going home, while Mr. Wemyss still wondered. They dined together and went to the play; and it was after midnight when he got to his rooms.