"I have told him the whole thing: how hard pressed I am; how his mother is worrying and ill—well, I don't feel it will make much difference. He could see all that."
"You must remember that he has always had every inducement to enjoy himself," the young doctor ventured. "He doesn't understand your life. You sent him to a very nice private school, and whenever he failed got him tutors. You made him feel that he was a special case in the world. And he has always been thrown with boys and young men who felt they were special cases. At college he lived with the same set—"
"His mother and I wanted him to start with every advantage, to have a gentleman's education. At home he's seen nothing of extravagance and self-indulgence."
Sommers nodded sympathetically. It was useless to discuss the matter. The upright, courageous old merchant, whose pride was that he had never committed one mean action in the accumulation of his fortune, could never understand this common misfortune. He belonged to a different world from that in which his son was to take his part. They turned to other topics,—the business depression, the strike, the threatened interference of the American Railway Union.
"Blaisdell, who is the general manager of the C. K. and G.," Colonel Hitchcock remarked, "was saying tonight that he expected the Pullman people would induce the A. R. U. to strike. If they stir up the unions all over the country, business will get worse and worse. All we needed to make things as bad as can be was a great railroad strike."
"I suppose so," Sommers responded. "Why won't the Pullman people consent to arbitrate?"
The old merchant shook his head.
"They'd divide their twenty millions of surplus and go out of business first. They say they're saving money on the strike. Did you ever know of people with the whip-hand who had anything to arbitrate?"
CHAPTER XIII
Dr. Lindsay's offices were ingeniously arranged on three sides of the Athenian Building. The patient entering from the hall, just beside the elevators, passed by a long, narrow corridor to the waiting room, and thence to one of the tiny offices of the attending physicians; or, if he were fortunate enough, he was led at once to the private office of the great Lindsay, at the end of the inner corridor. By a transverse passage he was then shunted off to a door that opened into the public hall just opposite the elevator well. The incoming patient was received by a woman clerk, who took his name, and was dismissed by another woman clerk, who collected fees and made appointments. If he came by special appointment, several stages in his progress were omitted, and he passed at once to one of the smaller offices, where he waited until the machine was ready to proceed with his case. Thus in the office there was a perpetual stream of the sick and suffering, in, around, out, crossed by the coming and going through transverse passages of the "staff," the attendants, the clerks, messengers, etc. Each atom in the stream was welling over with egotistic woes, far too many for the brief moment in which he would be closeted with the great one, who held the invisible keys of relief, who penetrated this mystery of human maladjustment. It was a busy, toiling, active, subdued place, where the tinkle of the telephone bell, the hum of electric annunciators, as one member of the staff signalled to another, vibrated in the tense atmosphere. Into this hive poured the suffering, mounting from the street, load after load, in the swiftly flying cages; their visit made, their joss-sticks burned, they dropped down once more to the chill world below, where they must carry on the burden of living.