For the first time he began to question Marion's feeling for him. She had been rather patronizing him lately. He had overheard her, once, speaking of him as a nice kid, and it rankled. In sheer assertion of his manhood he met Anna Klein outside the mill at the noon hour, the next day, and took her for a little ride in his car. After that he repeatedly did the same thing, choosing infrequented streets and roads, dining with her sometimes at a quiet hotel out on the Freeland road.
“How do you get away with this to your father?” he asked her once.
“Tell him you're getting ready to move out to the new plant, and we're working. He's not round much in the evenings now. He's at meetings, or swilling beer at Gus's saloon. They're a bad lot, Graham, that crowd at Gus's.”
“How do you mean, bad?”
“Well, they're Germans, for one thing, the sort that shouts about the Fatherland. They make me sick.”
“Let's forget them, honey,” said Graham, and reaching under the table-cloth, caught and held one of her hands.
He was beginning to look at things with the twisted vision of Marion's friends. He intended only to flirt a little with Anna Klein, but he considered that he was extremely virtuous and, perhaps, a bit of a fool for letting things go at that. Once, indeed, Tommy Hale happened on them in a road-house, sitting very quietly with a glass of beer before Graham and a lemonade in front of Anna, and had winked at him as though he had received him into the brotherhood of those who were seeing life.
Then, near the end of January, events took another step forward. Rudolph Klein was discharged from the mill.
Clayton, coming down one morning, found the manager, Hutchinson, and Dunbar in his office. The two men had had a difference of opinion, and the matter was laid before him.
“He is a constant disturbing element,” Hutchinson finished; “I understand Mr. Dunbar's position, but we can't afford to have the men thrown into a ferment, constantly.”