A Poor Wise Man | Page 8

being a Cardew beaten by
quite a lot."
Mademoiselle was deftly opening the girl's dressing case, but she
paused now and turned. It was to Grace that she spoke, however.
"They come home like that, all of them," she said. "In France also. But
in time they see the wisdom of the old order, and return. It is one of the
fruits of war."
Grace hardly heard her.
"Lily," she asked, "you are not in love with this Cameron person, are
you?"
But Lily's easy laugh reassured her.
"No, indeed," she said. "I am not. I shall probably marry beneath me, as
you would call it, but not William Wallace Cameron. For one thing, he
wouldn't have grandfather in his family."
Some time later Mademoiselle tapped at Grace's door, and entered.
Grace was reclining on a chaise longue, towels tucked about her neck
and over her pillows, while Castle, her elderly English maid, was
applying ice in a soft cloth to her face. Grace sat up. The towel, pinned
around her hair like a coif, gave a placid, almost nun-like appearance to
her still lovely face.

"Well?" she demanded. "Go out for a minute, Castle."
Mademoiselle waited until the maid had gone.
"I have spoken to Ellen," she said, her voice cautious. "A young man
who does not care for women, a clerk in a country pharmacy. What is
that, Mrs. Cardew?"
"It would be so dreadful, Mademoiselle. Her grandfather - "
"But not handsome," insisted Mademoiselle, "and lame! Also, I know
the child. She is not in love. When that comes to her we shall know it."
Grace lay back, relieved, but not entirely comforted.
"She is changed, isn't she, Mademoiselle?"
Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders.
"A phase," she said. She had got the word from old Anthony, who
regarded any mental attitude that did not conform with his own as a
condition that would pass. "A phase, only. Now that she is back among
familiar things, she will become again a daughter of the house."
"Then you think this talk about marrying beneath her - "
"She 'as had liberty," said Mademoiselle, who sometimes lost an
aspirate. "It is like wine to the young. It intoxicates. But it, too, passes.
In my country.
But Grace had, for a number of years, heard a great deal of
Mademoiselle's country. She settled herself on her pillows.
"Call Castle, please," she said. "And - do warn her not to voice those
ideas of hers to her grandfather. In a country pharmacy, you say?"
"And lame, and not fond of women," corroborated Mademoiselle. "Ca
ne pourrait pas etre mieux, n'est-ce pas?"

CHAPTER II
Shortly after the Civil War Anthony Cardew had left Pittsburgh and
spent a year in finding a location for the investment of his small capital.
That was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel. The iron business
had already laid the foundations of its future greatness, but steel was
still in its infancy.
Anthony's father had been an iron-master in a small way, with a
monthly pay-roll of a few hundred dollars, and an abiding faith in the
future of iron. But he had never dreamed of steel. But "sixty-five" saw
the first steel rail rolled in America, and Anthony Cardew began to
dream. He went to Chicago first, and from there to Michigan, to see the
first successful Bessemer converter. When he started east again he
knew what he was to make his life work.
He was very young and his capital was small. But he had an abiding
faith in the new industry. Not that he dreamed then of floating steel
battleships. But he did foresee steel in new and various uses. Later on
he was experimenting with steel cable at the very time Roebling made
it a commercial possibility, and with it the modern suspension bridge
and the elevator. He never quite forgave Roebling. That failure of his,
the difference only of a month or so, was one of the few
disappointments of his prosperous, self-centered, orderly life. That, and
Howard's marriage. And, at the height of his prosperity, the realization
that Howard's middle-class wife would never bear a son.
The city he chose was a small city then, yet it already showed signs of
approaching greatness. On the east side, across the river, he built his
first plant, a small one, with the blast heated by passing through cast
iron pipes, with the furnaceman testing the temperature with strips of
lead and zinc, and the skip hoist a patient mule.
He had ore within easy hauling distance, and he had fuel, and he had, as
time went on, a rapidly increasing market. Labor was cheap and
plentiful, too, and being American-born, was willing and intelligent.
Perhaps Anthony Cardew's sins of later years were due to a