Youth Challenges | Page 3

have been left suspended in rarefied heights between heaven and his business, lacking direct contact with the mills and machine shops and foundries; yet, doubtless, would have been unable to realize that the loss of Rangar had left him so. Rangar was a competent, efficient man, if peculiar in his ambitions.
"Your father," said he, "has asked me to show you through the plant."
"Thank you--yes," said Bonbright, rising.
They went out, passing from the old, the family, wing of the office building, into the larger, newer, general offices, made necessary by the vastly increased business of the firm. Here, in a huge room, were bookkeepers, stenographers, clerks, filing cabinets, desks, typewriters--with several cubicles glassed off for the more important employees and minor executives.
"We have tried," said Rangar, "to retain as far as possible the old methods and systems. Your father, Mr. Foote, is conservative. He clings to the ways of his father and his grandfather."
"I remember," said Bonbright, "when we had no typewriting machines."
"We had to come to them," said Rangar, with a note of regret. "Axles compelled us. But we have never taken up with these new contraptions --fads--like phonographs to dictate to, card indices, loose-leaf systems, adding machines, and the like. Of course it requires more clerks and stenographers, and possibly we are a bit slower than some. Your father says, however, that he prefers conducting his business as a gentleman should, rather than to make a mere machine of it. His idea," said Rangar, "of a gentleman in business is one who refuses to make use of abbreviations in his correspondence."
Bonbright was looking about the busy room, conscious that he was being covertly studied by every occupant of it. It made him uncomfortable, uneasy.
"Let's go on into the shops," he said, impatiently.
They turned, and encountered in the aisle a girl with a stenographer's notebook in her hand; indeed, Bonbright all but stepped on her. She was a slight, tiny thing, not thin, but small. Her eyes met Bonbright's eyes and she grinned. No other word can describe it. It was not an impertinent grin, nor a familiar grin, nor a COMMON grin. It was spontaneous, unstudied--it lay at the opposite end of the scale from Bonbright Foote VI's smile. Somehow the flash of it COMFORTED Bonbright. His sensations responded to it. It was a grin that radiated with well wishes for all the world. Bonbright smiled back, awkwardly, and bobbed his head as she stepped aside for him to pass.
"What a grin!" he said, presently.
"Oh," said Rangar. "Yes--to be sure. The Girl with the Grin--that's what they call her in the office. She's always doing it. Your father hasn't noticed. I hope he doesn't, for I'm sure he wouldn't like it."
"As if," said Bonbright to himself, "she were happy--and wanted everybody else to be."
"I'm sure I don't know," said Rangar. "She's competent."
They passed outside and through a covered passageway into the older of the shops. Bonbright was not thinking about the shops, but about the girl. She was the only thing he had encountered that momentous morning that had interested him, the only thing upon which Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, had not set the stamp of its repressing personality.
He tried to visualize her and her smile that he might experience again that sensation of relief, of lightened spirit. In a measure he was able to do so. Her mouth was large, he saw--no small mouth could have managed that grin. She was not pretty, but, somehow, attractive. Her eyes were bully; intelligent, humorous sort of eyes, he decided.
"Bet she's a darn nice kid," he concluded, boyishly. His father would have been shocked at a thought expressed in such words.
"The business has done wonders these last five years," said Rangar, intruding on Bonbright's thoughts. "Five years ago we employed less than a thousand hands; to-day we have more than five thousand on the payroll. Another few years and we shall have ten thousand."
"Axles?" asked Bonbright, mechanically.
"Axles," replied Rangar.
"Father doesn't approve of them--but they must be doing considerable for the family bank account."
Rangar shot a quick glance at the boy, a glance with reproof in it for such a flippancy. Vaguely he had heard that this young man had done things not expected from a Foote; had, for instance, gone in for athletics at the university. It was reported he had actually allowed himself to be carried once on the shoulders of a cheering mob of students! There were other rumors, also, which did not sit well on the Foote tradition. Rangar wondered if at last a Foote had been born into the family who was not off the old piece of cloth, who might, indeed, prove difficult and disappointing. The flippancy indicated it.
"Our inventory," he said, severely, "five years ago, showed a trifle over a million dollars. To-day these mills would