"Yes, of course, the sentiment for nails!" the young man accepted whimsically. "Poor Junior did the sentiment as well as the business so admirably, and I shall be such a hollow bluff at both, I fear."
Nevertheless, the next morning Vickers was at breakfast on time, and when the Colonel's motor came around at eight-thirty, he followed his father into the hall, put on an unobtrusive black hat, selected a sober pair of gloves, and leaving his little cane behind him took the seat beside his father. Their neighbor in the block was getting into his brougham at the same moment.
"Alexander Harmon," the Colonel explained, "president of the Commercial
Trust Company."
They passed more of the Colonel's acquaintances on their way down the avenue, emerging from their comfortable houses for the day's work. It was the order of an industrial society, the young man realized, in a depressed frame of mind. He also realized, sympathetically, that he was occupying his brother's seat in the motor, and he was sorry for the old man at his side. The Colonel looked at him as if he were debating whether he should ask his son to stop at a barber shop and sacrifice his pointed beard,—but he refrained.
Vickers had never seen the towering steel and terra-cotta building in which the hardware business was now housed. It stood in a cloud of mist and smoke close by the river in the warehouse district. As the car drew up before its pillared entrance, the Colonel pointed with pride to the brass plaque beside the door on which was engraved the architect's name.
"Corbin did it,—you know him? They say he's the best man in America. It was his idea to sign it, the same as they do in Paris. Pretty good building, eh?"
The young man threw back his head and cast a critical glance over the twelve-story monster and again at the dwarfed classic entrance through which was pouring just now a stream of young men.
"Yes, Corbin is a good man," he assented vaguely, looking through the smoke drifts down the long crowded thoroughfare, on into a mass of telegraph wires, masts, and smokestacks, and lines of bulky freight cars. Some huge drays were backed against the Price building receiving bundles of iron rods that fell clanging into their place. Wagons rattled past over the uneven pavement, and below along the river locomotives whistled. Above all was the bass overtone of the city, swelling louder each minute with the day's work. A picture of a fair palace in the cavernous depths of a Sienna street came over the young man with a vivid sense of pain. Under his breath he muttered to himself, "Fierce!" Then he glanced with compunction at the gentle old face by his side. How had he kept so perfectly sweet, so fine in the midst of all this welter? The Colonel was like an old Venetian lord, shrewd with the wisdom of men, gentle with more than a woman's mercy; but the current that flowed by his palace was not that of the Grand Canal, the winds not those of the Levant!
But mayhap there was a harmony in this shrill battlefield, if it could be found….
Within those long double doors there was a vast open area of floor space, dotted with iron beams, and divided economically into little plots by screens, in each one of which was a desk with the name of its occupant on an enamel sign.