With the office manager to help him, Jimmy progressed rapidly with his big idea.
It hadn’t taken them more than a few days to discover that the scheme of piping up heat from a fire in the ground was impractical. Then, when they came to study the company’s furnaces, about which Mr. Cooper, being entirely an office man, was almost as ignorant as Jimmy, they found that it was the unconsumed coal gases that could be piped up, not the actual heat—a conclusion that to Isaac Merkle had been immediately obvious.
At this point in their investigations they were jubilant, for they realized that the idea was feasible. Mr. Cooper was for an immediate consultation with one of the technical men of the company, but Jimmy absolutely refused. There were too many who knew about it already. Something might happen. And so the office manager had to give up that plan, and they went ahead, studying the thing out alone.
“I’d rather it took longer,” said Jimmy. “When we get it ready ourselves we’ll put it up to Mr. Wentworth. After that, we can talk to everybody all we want.”
It was just after this—early in November—that Jimmy met Estelle Wentworth socially. And the way it came about was this:
Estelle Wentworth was typically a daughter of the rich, aptly described by that familiar alliteration: pretty, proud and petulant. In all her twenty-one years she had been cared for with that care that only a misguided, adoring mother, a father weak enough to desire peace above all else, and the character-enervating luxuries that unlimited money can give.
Estelle was neither weak, nor vicious. She was only normal—and with her environment and upbringing was just what one would have expected her to be. Her one creed, at the age of twenty-one, was to have a good time. This, somehow, she found increasingly difficult. All the usual forms of pleasure desired by young girls, were freely hers. Dances, parties, the theater and opera, were all lavished upon her.
For a time they sufficed; and yet, because she was a normal girl, no finer or less fine than thousands of others of her race, inevitably the time came when she found herself desiring something more.
Affairs of the heart, which usually play so large a part in feminine adolescence, had never seriously touched Estelle. That, too, was the inevitable result of her environment. Young men admired her, adored her, and plied her with attentions. But Estelle felt herself in some way above them all. She accepted their adulation amusedly, just a little as a princess of the middle ages might have accepted the adulation of her courtiers—or laughed at the antics of her favorite jester—but nothing more.
Perhaps Estelle had no capacity for love; or perhaps, because of what civilization had made her, those men of deeper feelings knew that she had nothing to offer them—and so went their way.