“I’ve thought of that myself, though not in quite your felicitous phrases.”
“Don’t rub it in!” Amidon protested. “I guess the less I think about a girl like that the better for me. And I guess there’s plenty of fellows got their eye on her. I’ve heard some talk at the store about her and the boss.”
“She doesn’t lack admirers, of course. When you say ‘boss,’ you refer, I assume, to Mr. Copeland?”
Eaton looked up from the polishing of his glasses—a rite performed with scrupulous care. The vague stare of his near-sighted eyes, unprotected by his glasses, added to a disinterestedness expressed otherwise by his careless tone.
“Well,” Amidon began, defensively, “Copeland is the boss, all right,—that is, when he’s on the job at all. He’s some sport, but when he calls me into his pen and goes over my orders, he knows whether I’m on the right side of the average. Only he doesn’t do that with any of the boys more than once in two months. He doesn’t quite get the habit; just seems to think of it occasionally.”
“Capacity without application! Unfortunate, but not incurable. To be sure, an old business like Copeland-Farley is hard to kill. Billy Copeland’s father had the constructive genius, and Farley had the driving power. It’s up to Billy not to let the house die on his hands. Trouble is, the iron diminishes in the blood of a new generation: too easy a time of it, soft-handed, loss of moral force, and that sort of thing.”
“I guess Copeland travels a pretty lively clip, all right,” ventured Amidon, not without a tinge of pride in his boss. “He and Kinney are pace-setters; they’ve got plenty of gasoline in the buggy and like to burn it. The boss may be a sport, but he’s a good fellow, anyhow. I guess if he wants to marry Miss Farley he’s got a right to.”
He uttered this tamely, doubtful as to how his guide and mentor might receive it, but anxious to evoke an expression.
“A trifle weak, but well-meaning,” remarked Eaton, as though he had been searching some time for a phrase that expressed his true appraisement of Copeland. “It’s deplorable that fellows like that—who really have some capacity, but who are weak-sinewed morally—can’t be protected from their own folly; saved, perhaps. Our religion, Amidon, is deficient in its practical application. A hand on your boss’s shoulder at the right moment, a word of friendly admonition, might—er—save him from a too-wasteful expenditure of gasoline. If I had the gift of literary expression, I should like to write a treatise on man’s duty to man. It’s odd, Amidon,” he went on, refilling his pipe, “that we must sit by—chaps like you and me—and see our brothers skidding into the ditch and never feel any responsibility about them. Doubtless you and I are known to many of our friends as weak mortals, in dire need of help,—or, perhaps, only a word of warning that the bridges are down ahead of us would suffice,—and yet how rarely do we feel that hand on the shoulder? We should be annoyed, displeased, hot clean through, if anybody—even an old and valued friend—should beg us to slow down. It’s queer, Amidon, how reluctant we are to extend the saving hand. Timidity, fear of offending and that sort of thing holds us back. It becomes necessary to perform our Christian duty in the dark, by the most indirect and hidden methods.”
Amidon frowned, not sure that he understood; and he hated himself when he did not understand Eaton. Not to grasp his friend’s ideas convicted him of stupidity and ignorance. Religion in Amidon’s experience meant going to church and being bored. He remembered that the last time he had visited a church he had gone to hear a girl acquaintance sing a solo. She sang very badly, indeed, and he had been depressed by the knowledge that she was spending for music lessons wages earned as a clerk at the soap and perfumery counter in a department store. Eaton’s occasional monologues on what, for a better name, he called his friend’s religion, struck him as fantastic; he was never sure that Eaton wasn’t kidding him; and the suspicion that you are being kidded by a man at whose feet you sit in adoration is not agreeable. But Eaton had become intelligible again.