Bojo felt the embarrassment that possessed him. He had come to ask a score of questions. He started to leave with the feeling that he had found out nothing. At the noise of his going, Louise came out of the room with her hair down. Probably she had been listening. She said good-by to him with extra cordiality, with an ironical look in her eyes.
"Mind you look us up after."
"Yes, yes."
Fred accompanied him to the elevator.
"As soon as we are settled we'll have a spree," he said with an attempt at the old gaiety.
"Of course."
Bojo went off shrugging his shoulders, saying to himself, "Where will it all end?"
During the Summer a marked change had come over industrial conditions, a feeling of something ominous was in the air, a vague and undefined threat impending. At the factory a fifth of the machines were idle and Garnett was moodily contemplating a general reduction in salaries. Bojo scarcely paid any attention to Wall Street matters now, but he knew that the movement downward of values had been slow and gradual and that prophecies of dark days were current. Matters with Marsh were going badly. Advertisers were deserting the paper, there had been several minor strikes with costly readjustments. Roscoe seemed to have lost his early enthusiasm, to be increasingly moody, impatient and quick to take offense. The reasons given for the business depression were many, over capitalization, timidity of the small investors due to the exposure of great corporations, distrust of radical political reforms. Whatever the causes, the receding tide had come. People were apprehensive, dispirited, talking poverty. Granning held that the country was paying for the sins of the great financial adventurers and the cost of the giddy structures they had thrown up. Marsh from the knowledge of his newspaper world, held that below all was the coalescing power of great banking systems, arrayed against the government on one side and on the other, waiting their opportunity to crush the new-risen financial idea of the Trust Company organized to deal in speculative ventures denied to them. When Bojo in his simplicity asked why in a great growing nation of boundless resources, a panic should ever be necessary, each sought to explain with confusing logic which did not convince at all. Only from it he gathered that above the great productive mechanism of the nation was an artificial structure, in the possession of powerful groups able to control the sources of credit on which the sources of production depend.
Four days after he had read in the newspapers the account of Doris's wedding to Boskirk, about seven o'clock in the evening, while he was waiting for Roscoe to call for him to go out to dinner, Sweeney, the Jap, brought him a card.
It was from Patsie, hastily scribbled across, "I am outside. Can you come and see me?"