“I am taking care of him,” he told her easily. “From Vedder Court run subways along the docks.”
“I see!” interrupted Gail. “You have secured control of the steamship companies, of the foreign railroads, of everything which hauls and carries!”
“Airships excepted,” he laughingly informed her. “Gail, it’s an empire, and none so great ever existed in all the world! The giant monopolies of which so much has been said, are only parts of it, like principalities in a kingdom. There isn’t a nook or corner on the globe where one finger of my giant does not rest. The armies which swept down from the north and devastated Europe, the hordes which spread from Rome, the legions which marched to Moscow, even those mighty armies of the Iliad and the Odyssey were insignificant as compared to the sway of this tremendous organisation! All commerce, all finance, all politics, must bow the knee to it, and serve it! Maps will be shifted for its needs. Nations will rise and fall as it shall decree, and the whole world, every last creature of it, shall feed it and be fed by it!”
He paused, and turned to her with a positive radiance on the face which she had always considered heavy. She had looked on him as a highly successful money-grubber, as a commercial genius, as a magician of manipulation, as a master of men; but he was more than all these; he was a poet, whose rude epics were written in the metre of whirling wheels and flying engines and pounding propellers; a poet whose dreams extended beyond the confines of imagination itself; and then, above that, a sorcerer who builded what he dreamed!
There is a magic thrill in creation. It extends beyond the creator to the created, and it inspires all who come in contact with it. Gail’s eager mind traversed again and again the girdle he had looped around the world, darting into all its intricacies and ramifications, until she, too, had pursued it into all the obscure nooks and crannies, and saw the most remote and distant peoples dependent upon it, and paying toll to it, and swaying to its command. This was a dream worthy of accomplishment; a dream beyond which there could be no superlative; and the man beside her had dreamed it, and had builded it; and all this would not have happened if she had not given him the hint with one potent word which had spurred him, and set his marvellously constructive mind to work.
In so far they were partners in this mighty enterprise, and he had been magnanimous enough to acknowledge her part in it. It drew them strangely near. It was a universe, in the conception of which no other minds than theirs had dabbled, in the modelling of which no other hand had been thrust. What agile mind, gifted with ambition, and broad conception, and the restlessness which, in her, had not only ranged world wide but beyond the æther and across the vast seas of superstition and ignorance and credulity to God himself; what mind such as this could resist the insidious flattery of that mighty collaboration?
She was silent now, and he left her silent, brooding, himself, upon the vast scope of his dreaming, and planning still to centre more and more the fruits of that dreaming within his own eager hand.
Roseleaf Inn. Gail recognised it with a smile as they turned in at the drive. She was glad that they had come here, for it was linked in her mind with the beginnings of that great project of which she had been the impulse, and in which the thing in her that had been denied opportunity because she was a woman, claimed a hungry share. At his suggestion—it was more like a command, but she scarcely noticed—she telephoned that she was going to remain to dinner with Allison; and then they enjoyed a two hour chat of many things, trivial in themselves, but fraught now with delightful meaning, because they had to think on so many unexpressed things, larger than these idle people about them could conceive, or grasp if they knew.
She telephoned that she was going to remain to dinner with Allison; and they enjoyed a two hour chat of many things