When at last he was sitting opposite her, they talked long and seriously about his business worries, his plans, and the trouble he had with artists who thought it a disgrace to work for the trade, and could only be induced to execute orders when, as it were, he held a pistol to their heads. He spoke of the rivals with whom he competed in business, who built palaces for their workshops in order to dazzle customers, so that he too was forced to transform his good solid old business house into a modern structure with the latest improvements.
His customers too were a source of endless anxiety to him. Some, actuated by the newest ideals in art which were the fashion in the capital, demanded his pandering to the "Secession" movement, and putting on the market long-necked, narrow-whipped bodies in exaggerated attitudes of insane distortion. But the steady public of mediocrity, which was really the purchasing public, would have nothing to say to this trash, and insisted on having knights in armour and their dames in fancy-dress, damsels picking flowers and drawing water, hunted stags and swinging monkeys, the same, in fact, as had been in vogue thirty years before. So he stood, as it were, between two rocks, on one of which he might be wrecked as out of date and old-fashioned, on the other as too advanced and modern. In the latter case he would forfeit most of his old and well-tried patrons. It was extremely difficult to steer a middle course, but it had to be done.
He spoke often, too, of the factory and its hundreds of industrial hands who from early morning till late at night worked for the welfare of the business, and of the alterations which were nearing completion, and which, judging by the architect's designs and the sum which he had spent, ought to be something worth seeing.
"You see what competition compels a man to do," he wound up.
Lilly, with beaming eyes, listened attentively. She took interest in everything. She wanted to hear details of life in the factory with its whirling machinery, clatter of wheels, its hissing furnaces and shrieking files. She never wearied of asking questions about the appearance and behaviour of the workpeople, their wages, their condition, and what became of them afterwards. She felt as if there, in the great hum of the factory, was living reality, while outside her own existence was a shadowy illusion.
"How I envy you," she would exclaim sometimes, "to have so many men's lives in your keeping!"
"They keep you always on the go," he replied; "it's an enormous responsibility and worry."
She was sure he was a benevolent master, even if he would not own it himself. He had such great influence, and his heart was so kind.
He liked to hear her talk like this, though often in the middle of what she was saying he would spring up and walk about the room with excited, short steps, and then stand still in front of her, and stare down on her with gloomy solicitous eyes, as if he could not control his contending emotions.
Lilly appeared to notice nothing, though she knew perfectly well what was passing in his mind at these moments.