Dangerous Days | Page 4

return from the continent and
England days before, of a change in himself. He had not recognized it
until he reached home. And he was angry with himself for feeling it. He
had gone abroad for certain Italian contracts and had obtained them. A
year or two, if the war lasted so long, and he would be on his feet at last,

after years of struggle to keep his organization together through the
hard times that preceded the war. He would be much more than on his
feet. Given three more years of war, and he would be a very rich man.
And now that the goal was within sight, he was finding that it was not
money he wanted. There were some things money could not buy. He
had always spent money. His anxieties had not influenced his scale of
living. Money, for instance, could not buy peace for the world; or peace
for a man, either. It had only one value for a man; it gave him
independence of other men, made him free.
"Three things," said the rector, apropos of something or other, and
rather oratorically, "are required by the normal man. Work, play, and
love. Assure the crippled soldier that he has lost none of these, and - "
Work and play and love. Well, God knows he had worked. Play? He
would have to take up golf again more regularly. He ought to play three
times a week. Perhaps he could take a motor-tour now and then, too.
Natalie would like that.
Love? He had not thought about love very much. A married man of
forty-five certainly had no business thinking about love. No, he
certainly did not want love. He felt rather absurd, even thinking about it.
And yet, in the same flash, came a thought of the violent passions of his
early twenties. There had been a time when he had suffered horribly
because Natalie had not wanted to marry him. He was glad all that was
over. No, he certainly did not want love.
He drew a long breath and straightened up.
"How about those plans, Rodney?" he inquired genially. "Natalie says
you have them ready to look over."
"I'll bring them round, any time you say."
"To-morrow, then. Better not lose any time. Building is going to be a
slow matter, at the best."

"Slow and expensive," Page added. He smiled at his host, but Clayton
Spencer remained grave.
"I've been away," he said, "and I don't know what Natalie and you have
cooked up between you. But just remember this: I want a comfortable
country house. I don't want a public library."
Page looked uncomfortable. The move into the drawing-room covered
his uneasiness, but he found a moment later on to revert to the subject.
"I have tried to carry out Natalie's ideas, Clay," he said. "She wanted a
sizeable place, you know. A wing for house-parties, and - that sort of
thing."
Clayton's eyes roamed about the room, where portly Mrs. Haverford
was still knitting placidly, where the Chris Valentines were quarreling
under pretense of raillery, where Toots Hayden was smoking a cigaret
in a corner and smiling up at Graham, and where Natalie, exquisite and
precise, was supervising the laying out of a bridge table.
"She would, of course," he observed, rather curtly, and, moving
through a French window, went out onto a small balcony into the night.
He was irritated with himself. What had come over him? He shook
himself, and drew a long breath of the sweet night air. His tall, boyishly
straight figure dominated the little place. In the half-light he looked,
indeed, like an overgrown boy. He always looked like Graham's brother,
anyhow; it was one of Natalie's complaints against him. But he put the
thought of Natalie away, along with his new discontent. By George, it
was something to feel that, if a man could not fight in this war, at least
he could make shells to help end it. Oblivious to the laughter in the
room behind him, the clink of glass as whiskey-and-soda was brought
in, he planned there in the darkness, new organization, new expansions
- and found in it a great content.
He was proud of his mills. They were his, of his making. The small
iron foundry of his father's building had developed into the colossal
furnaces that night after night lighted the down-town district like a

great conflagration. He was proud of his mills and of his men. He liked
to take men and see them work out his judgment of them. He was not
often wrong. Take that room behind him: Rodney Page, dilettante,
liked by women, who called him "Roddie," a trifle unscrupulous but
not entirely a knave, the sort of man one trusted with everything but
one's