“I'll bring them round, any time you say.”
“To-morrow, then. Better not lose any time. Building is going to be a slow matter, at the best.”
“Slow and expensive,” Page added. He smiled at his host, but Clayton Spencer remained grave.
“I've been away,” he said, “and I don't know what Natalie and you have cooked up between you. But just remember this: I want a comfortable country house. I don't want a public library.”
Page looked uncomfortable. The move into the drawing-room covered his uneasiness, but he found a moment later on to revert to the subject.
“I have tried to carry out Natalie's ideas, Clay,” he said. “She wanted a sizeable place, you know. A wing for house-parties, and—that sort of thing.”
Clayton's eyes roamed about the room, where portly Mrs. Haverford was still knitting placidly, where the Chris Valentines were quarreling under pretense of raillery, where Toots Hayden was smoking a cigaret in a corner and smiling up at Graham, and where Natalie, exquisite and precise, was supervising the laying out of a bridge table.
“She would, of course,” he observed, rather curtly, and, moving through a French window, went out onto a small balcony into the night.
He was irritated with himself. What had come over him? He shook himself, and drew a long breath of the sweet night air. His tall, boyishly straight figure dominated the little place. In the half-light he looked, indeed, like an overgrown boy. He always looked like Graham's brother, anyhow; it was one of Natalie's complaints against him. But he put the thought of Natalie away, along with his new discontent. By George, it was something to feel that, if a man could not fight in this war, at least he could make shells to help end it. Oblivious to the laughter in the room behind him, the clink of glass as whiskey-and-soda was brought in, he planned there in the darkness, new organization, new expansions—and found in it a great content.
He was proud of his mills. They were his, of his making. The small iron foundry of his father's building had developed into the colossal furnaces that night after night lighted the down-town district like a great conflagration. He was proud of his mills and of his men. He liked to take men and see them work out his judgment of them. He was not often wrong. Take that room behind him: Rodney Page, dilettante, liked by women, who called him “Roddie,” a trifle unscrupulous but not entirely a knave, the sort of man one trusted with everything but one's wife; Chris, too—only he let married women alone, and forgot to pay back the money he borrowed. There was only one man in the room about whom he was beginning to mistrust his judgment, and that was his own son.