"There's a science of living—and some of that is in books too."
"Well, how about church? You've got the damnedest habit of steering the conversation off the subject I've ever seen. There's only one science of living—get the stuff, then you can live as you damn please."
"Surely you don't expect me to go to church just to help business."
"You mean to say you don't go to church at all?"
"About that. Once in a while to a cathedral—when I want to think or dream, and there happens to be a cathedral handy, or else to some little quiet parish church that I'm certain beforehand has an eleventh century smell."
"I'm a Presbyterian," he announced stoutly, as if I would dispute him, and bit off the end of another impossible cigar. "Everybody ought to be something." He had ignored my cathedral reply.
"True," I said, "but why Presbyterian when one might choose so many other things to be? Aren't they the people who believe something dreadful about babies?"
"My father was a Presbyterian—he was an old Scotch engineer and went to sea for forty years. I've always kept up what he thought, for no one ever got ahead of the old man—not much."
So this man was an idealist down underneath all that hard, surface veneer of remorseless business! It was quite obvious that the old Scotch engineer had not laid up treasures for his posterity, and yet he had left a clear impression that "no one ever got ahead of him"—an ideal of success, recognized as success, not built on the attainment of wealth. I felt a lot better about Knowlton—we were going to get on, I was certain. But I didn't dare tell him all this, for I knew he wouldn't understand. I was even sorry I had been flippant about Presbyterians. After all, it was a silly pose to patronize a man who had made his way from the bottom to the position of a first class engineer, whereas I had done nothing but read a few books and drift about the world.
"Knowlton," I asked, in all seriousness this time, "will you have another drink?"