Mr. Hope, with an injured air, stated a remembrance of their first agreement that was totally at variance with what Mr. Merkle’s own memory told him were the facts. And he remained obdurate—ten per cent or nothing. Hadn’t he originated the plan? Wasn’t he prepared now to handle all the business details? If Mr. Merkle didn’t like the ten per cent he needn’t accept it; Mr. Hope would consult another technical man.
The chemist, seeing that anger got him nothing, turned to appeal. He wheedled; he cajoled; he pleaded friendship—all to no avail. Ten per cent or nothing!
Then Mr. Merkle, seeing he was beaten, suddenly capitulated. “You could make it ten per cent,” he said with a sigh. “But in writing; when you say it, with me it’s no good any more—that ain’t business.”
And Mr. Hope, smiling triumphantly, wrote it out in due form.
Estelle’s opera party that next evening was a great success. Jimmy found himself, to his great surprise, liking Estelle. She was different from any girl he had ever met. She made him feel small and inadequate, somehow, and he knew he would never quite lose the awe she inspired in him. But he liked her.
Estelle, on her part, liked Jimmy, mostly because it enhanced her own self-importance to feel how she must appear to him. And so, on the surface at least, they got along famously.
During the opera Jimmy’s mind, in spite of, his efforts, wandered from the stage. He found himself once looking back over his shoulder at the wonderful “horse-shoe” over his head—that long, curving line of boxes where the most brilliant ladies of the world’s greatest city were sitting now. In the dim light he could see the little spots of color that marked them. The great, crowded auditorium awed him a little; and he felt, too, a curious exaltation that he should be there—Jimmy Rand, of the Fallon Brothers Mine, a part of all this splendor.
He wished Anne could be with him, or could see him there, in his black evening clothes sitting between these two dainty girls. It seemed to symbolize success to Jimmy. He was a success; he was going up the ladder—making himself into somebody. He was conscious of a vague pride in what he had achieved already, and he would have liked Anne to have seen this tangible evidence of it, so that she might be proud, too.
It never occurred to Jimmy that the sight of him at that moment would have caused Anne any pain. Her letters to him had always been so tenderly proud of his great accomplishments. She was always so interested and pleased at his accounts of the things he did.
When he had seen her the last time, hardly a month before, Jimmy had not noticed, nor would he have understood, the new, wistful look that was in her eyes when she had told him timidly that he was “growing up into a—a real gentleman.” Nor did he ever know that she cried over many of his letters before she sat down bravely to answer them.