“I want to begin dressing at seven-fifteen,” he directed. “At three o’clock set some sandwiches inside the door. Have some fruit in my dressing-room.”
He went back to his map, remembering Lucile with a retrospective smile. The last time he had seen that vivacious young person she had been emptying a box of almonds, at the side of the camp fire at the toboggan party. He jotted down a memorandum to send her some, and drew a high stool in front of the map.
Strange this new ambition which had come to him. Why, he had actually been about to consider his big work finished; and now, all at once, everything he had done seemed trivial. The eager desire of youth to achieve had come to him again, and the blood sang in his veins as he felt of his lusty strength. He was starting to build, with a youth’s enthusiasm but with a man’s experience, and with the momentum of success and the power of capital. Something had crystallised him in the past few days.
At 7:15 Ephraim found him at the end of the table in the midst of some neat and intricate tabulations
Across the fertile fields and the mighty mountains and the arid deserts of the United States, there angled four black threads, from coast to coast, and everywhere else were shorter main lines and shorter branches, and, last of all, mere fragments of railroads. He began with the long, angling threads, but he ended with the fragments, and these, in turns, he gave minute and careful study. At three o’clock he took a sandwich and ordered his car. He was gone less than an hour, and came back with an armload of books; government reports, volumes of statistics, and a file of more intimate information from the office of his broker. He threw off his coat when he came in this time, and spread, on the big, lion-clawed table at which Napoleon had once planned a campaign, a vari-coloured mass of railroad maps. At seven-fifteen old Ephraim found him at the end of the table in the midst of some neat and intricate tabulations.
“Time to dress, sir,” suggested Ephraim.
Allison pushed to the floor the railroad map upon which he had been working, and pulled another one towards him. Ephraim waited one minute.
“I’ve run your tub, sir.”
Allison leafed rapidly through the pages of an already hard-used book, to the section concerning the Indianapolis and St. Joe Railroad. Ephraim looked around calculatingly, and selected an old atlas from the top of the case near the door. He held it aloft an instant, and let it fall with a slam.