As the little group broke up, Harris linked his arm in Hart's.
"I've got something to say to you, Jackie," he said boisterously. "We'll order dinner, if you are free, and I'll put you up to something that's better than old Pemberton's talk. It just occurred to me while we were gassing here."
The young architect did not quite like Harris's style, but he had already planned to dine at the club, and they went upstairs to the dining-room together. He was curious to hear what the broker might have to suggest to him.
Hart had agreed with Pemberton's ideas, naturally enough, in the abstract. But in the concrete, the force of circumstances, here in this roaring city where he found himself caught, was fast preparing him to accept the Harris view. Like most men of his class he was neither an idealist nor a weakling: he was merely a young man, still making up his character as he went along, and taking color more or less from the landscape he found himself in.
His aspirations for art, if not fine, were sufficiently earnest and sincere. He had always thought of himself as luckily fortuned, so that he could devote himself to getting real distinction in his profession. So he had planned his life in Paris. Now, brought back from that pleasant world into this stern city, with all its striving, apparently, centred upon the one business of making money, then deprived by what seemed to him a harsh and unfair freak of fortune of all his pleasant expectations, he was trying to read the face of Destiny. And there he seemed to find written what this gritty broker had harshly expressed. There was, to be sure, another road to fortune, which had not been mentioned, and that was to make a rich marriage. This road had been followed with signal success by a number of his acquaintances: it was one of the well-recognized methods of attaining that point of vantage which he had hoped to inherit,—to win one of the daughters of wealth! And since his return from Europe the young architect had had his opportunities in the society where he had been welcomed. But apart from his growing love for Helen Spellman, he was too sturdy a man to like this easy method of advancement. He turned from the idea with instinctive repugnance, and an honest feeling of contempt for the men who in that way had sneaked into fortune.
"Say, you've got a good friend in Mrs. Will Phillips," Harris began bluntly when they were seated opposite each other.
"Oh, Mrs. Phillips! I used to see something of her in Paris," Jackson acknowledged indifferently.
He remembered that he had not followed the widow's invitation to call upon her, all thought of her having been driven out of his mind by the happenings of the last few days.
"I rather think she would like to see more of you in Chicago!" the broker laughed back.
"How do you know?" Hart asked, wondering where Harris's path crossed that of the gay Mrs. Phillips.