The girl met his glance squarely, and a little wave of color mounted to her cheeks; but she did not answer.
“I want to marry you, Anne. Some day—maybe soon—when I’ve put this idea over—when I amount to something. I want you for my wife—because—because I love you so much, and you love me. Will you, Anne—will you?”
The girl’s arms went up about his neck; her upturned face was tender with love; her eyes, glistening with tears of happiness, met his without a trace of coquetry.
“Yes, Jimmy, I will,” she whispered.
The New York offices of the Wentworth Glass Company occupied an entire floor of a large office-building on Broadway near Wall Street. At ten o’clock on the Tuesday morning following his momentous walk with Anne to the burning mines and the birth of his big idea, Jimmy entered the Wentworth Company’s offices. He passed through a door marked “Information,” and found himself in a little enclosure facing a low wooden railing and a girl at a telephone switchboard.
Behind her he could see a hundred other girls at typewriters, and the steady click of their machines filled the air with a low, confused hum. It seemed to Jimmy that all the business in the world was being transacted in that room at that moment. For an instant he stood appalled. Then he walked up to the switchboard and addressed the girl.
“I want to see Mr. Wentworth—Mr. Robert G. Wentworth,” he said. “He’s the president, isn’t he?”
The girl stared; then she smiled. Jimmy smiled, too—a frank, friendly smile, so ingenuous that it probably surprised the girl even more than his request.
“Have you got an appointment with Mr. Wentworth?”
Jimmy smiled again. “No,” he admitted. “But I’ve something to say to him—something important, that he’ll be glad to hear.”