“After stella, star, because the metal turned out to be so bright. It has some steel in it, too.”
He shifted his arms, sank his head into the palm of his left hand, and gazed at me solemnly.
“All the processes are patented,” he added, with a kind of unconscious caution which amused me. I felt as though he imagined we were looking too curiously into the workshop, where the perfecting processes were still going on, and might desire to steal his ideas.
“There ought to be a real fortune in that,” I said.
“Yes,” he replied, with a kind of lust for money showing in his face, although he was already comfortably rich and daily growing richer as well as sicker, “we’re already behind on our orders. Everybody wants to see it. We can use a lot ourselves if we can just make it fast enough.”
There was a time in my life when I would have envied a man of this type, or his son, the mere possession of money seemed such an important thing to me. Later on, it became the sign manual of certain limitations of thought which at first irritated and then bored me. Now I can scarcely endure the presence of a mind that sees something in money as money—the mere possession of it. If the mind does not race on to lovelier or more important things than money can buy, it has no import to the world, no more, at least, than is involved in the syphoning of a clam. We must have grocers and brewers and butchers and bakers—but if we were never to have more than these or anything different or new!!
CHAPTER XLIV
THE FOLKS AT CARMEL
The run to Carmel, Franklin’s home, was not long—say, forty miles—and we made it in a downpour and were silent most of the way. It was so dark and damp and gloomy that no one seemed to want to talk, and yet I took a melancholy comfort in considering how absolutely cheerless the day was. I could not help reflecting, as we sped along, how at its worst life persistently develops charm, so that if one were compelled to live always in so gloomy a world, one would shortly become inured to it, or the race would, and think nothing of it.
Once Speed called my attention to a group of cattle with their heads to wind and rain, and asked, “Do you know why they stand that way?”
“No,” I replied.