Mrs. Mills extended her hand with a gracious smile as Bruce was presented. She was tall and fair and moved with a lazy sort of grace. She spoke in a low, murmurous tone little broken by inflections. Bruce noted that she was dressed rather more smartly than the other women present. It seemed to him that the atmosphere of the room changed perceptibly on her appearance; or it might have been merely that everyone paused a minute to inspect her or to hear what she had to say. Bruce surmised from the self-conscious look in her handsome gray eyes as she crossed the room that she enjoyed being the center of attention.
“Shep just would spend the day motoring to some queer place,” she was saying, “where a lot of people were killed by the Indians ages ago. Most depressing! Ruined the day for me! He’s going to set up a monument or something to mark the painful affair.”
Shepherd Mills greeted Bruce in the quick, eager fashion of a diffident person anxious to appear cordial but not sure that his good intentions will be understood, and suggested that they sit down. He was not so tall as his wife; his face was long and rather delicate. His slight reddish mustache seemed out of place on his lip; it did not quite succeed in giving him a masculine air. His speech was marked by odd, abrupt pauses, as though he were trying to hide a stammer; or it might have been that he was merely waiting to note the effect of what he was saying upon the hearer. He drew out a case and offered Bruce a cigarette, lighted one himself, smoking as though it were part of a required social routine to which he conformed perforce but did not relish particularly.
There was to be a tennis tournament at the country club the coming week and he mentioned this tentatively and was embarrassed to find that Bruce knew nothing about it.
“Oh, I’m always forgetting that everyone doesn’t live here!” he laughed apologetically. “A little weakness of the provincial mind! I suppose we’re horribly provincial out here. Do we strike you that way, Mr. Storrs?”
One might have surmised from his tone that he was used to having his serious questions ignored or answered flippantly, but hoped that the stranger would meet him on his own ground.
“Oh, there isn’t any such thing as provincialism any more, is there?” asked Bruce amiably. “I haven’t sniffed anything of the sort in your city: you seem very metropolitan. The fact is, I’m a good deal of a hick myself!”
Mills laughed with more fervor than the remark justified. Evidently satisfied of the intelligence and good nature of the Freemans’ guest, he began to discuss the effect upon industry of a pending coal strike.
His hand went frequently to his mustache as he talked and the leg that he swung over his knee waggled nervously. He plunged into a discussion of labor, mentioning foreign market conditions and citing figures from trade journals showing the losses to both capital and labor caused by the frequent disturbances in the industrial world. He expressed opinions tentatively, a little apologetically, and withdrew them quickly when they were questioned. Bruce, having tramped through one of the coal fields where a strike was in progress, described the conditions as he had observed them. Mills expressed the greatest interest; the frown deepened on his face as he listened.
“That’s bad; things shouldn’t be that way,” he said. “The truth of the matter is that we haven’t mastered the handling of business. It’s stupendous; we’ve outgrown the old methods. We forget the vast territory we have to handle and the numbers of men it’s necessary to keep in touch with. When my Grandfather Mills set up as a manufacturer here he had fifty men working for him, and he knew them all—knew their families, circumstances, everything. Now I have six hundred in my battery plant and don’t know fifty of them! But I’d like to know them all; I feel that it’s my duty to know them.”