Edward had ideas of his own about his future, and it came as a surprise to be invited at breakfast to visit the factory one day during vacation from Oxford. Instinctively he glanced, not at his mother, but at his clothes. He was not precisely a dandy, but had money to burn and burned a good deal of it at his tailor’s.
“The factory, I said, not the coal-mine,” Reuben said, noting his son’s impulse. “You have looked at your clothes. Now let us go and look at the first cause of the clothes. As a young philosopher you should be interested in first causes.”
“Oh, is it necessary, Reuben?” pleaded Dorothy.
“Sparks should know where the flames come from,” said Reuben.
“I have great curiosity to see the factory, sir,” said Edward. “I showed surprise, but that was natural. You have hidden the factory from us all as if it were a Pandora’s box and if you judge the time now come when I am to see the place from which our blessings come, I assure you I am flattered by your confidence. But I warn you I am not persuaded in advance to admire the box.”
Reuben smiled grimly at his hinted opposition. “If you look with sense, you will admire,” he said. “Factories run to usefulness, not beauty. Shall we go?”
They went, and Reuben exhibited his factory with thoroughness, with the zest of a man who had created it, but now and then with the impatience of the expert who does not concede enough to the slow-following thought of the lay mind. Edward began with every intention to appreciate, but as Reuben explained the processes, found nothing but antipathy grow within him.
He breathed a foul, hot, dust-laden air, he hadn’t a mechanical turn of mind and was mystified by operations which Reuben imagined he expounded lucidly. Once the thread was lost, the whole affair was simply puzzlement and he had the feeling of groping in a fog, a hideously noisy fog, where wheels monotonously went round, spinning mules beat senselessly to and fro and dirty men and women looked resentfully at him. It seemed to him a hell worse than any Dante had described, with sufferers more hopeless, bound in stupid misery. He was not thinking of the sufferers with any great humanitarianism: they were of a lower order and this no doubt was all that they were fit for. He was thinking of them with disgust, objecting to breathe the same air, revolted by their smells, but he was conscious of, at least, some sentiment of pity. If he had understood the meaning of it all, he felt that he would have seen things like these in true perspective, but he missed the keys to it, was nauseated when he ought to have been interested and his attempted queries grew less and less to the point.
Reuben perceived at last that he was lecturing an inattentive audience. “Come into the office,” he said, and in that humaner place, with its great bureau, its library of ledgers and its capacious chairs for callers, where the engine throbbed with a diminished hum, Edward tried to collect his thoughts. “This,” Reuben emphasized, “is where I do my work. I go through the factory twice a day, otherwise, I am to be found in here. A glass of wine to wash the dust out of your throat?”
Edward was grateful: but wine could not wash his repugnance away. “Well, now,” asked Reuben, “what do you think?”