It was a night in September and a whisper of the coming frost was in the air. He threw up the window and took long breaths of the sharp air and listened to the rumble of the elevated road in the distance. Looking up the boulevard he saw the lights of the cyclists making a glistening stream that flowed past the house. A thought of his new motor car and of all of the wonder of the mechanical progress of the world ran through his mind.
“The men who make machines do not hesitate,” he said to himself; “even though a thousand fat-hearted men stood in their way they would go on.”
A line of Tennyson’s came into his mind.
“And the nation’s airy navies grappling in the central blue,” he quoted, thinking of an article he had read predicting the coming of airships.
He thought of the lives of the workers in steel and iron and of the things they had done and would do.
“They have,” he thought, “freedom. Steel and iron do not run home to carry the struggle to women sitting by the fire.”
He walked up and down the room.
“Fat old coward. Damned fat old coward,” he muttered over and over to himself.
It was past midnight when he got into bed and began trying to quiet himself for sleep. In his dreams he saw a fat man with a chorus girl hanging to his arm kicking his head about a bridge above a swiftly flowing stream.
When he got down to the breakfast room the next morning Sue had gone. By his plate he found a note saying that she had gone for Colonel Tom and would take him to the country for the day. He walked to the office thinking of the incapable old man who, in the name of sentiment, had beaten him in what he thought the big enterprise of his life.