CHAPTER XXV

MAN AND GENTLEMAN

A few evenings later, Del, in a less strained, less despondent frame of mind, coming home from supper at her mother’s, found Estelle Wilmot on the front veranda talking with Lorry Tague.  She had seen this same sight perhaps half-a-dozen times since Estelle and Arden had come to stop with her at the Villa d’Orsay.  On this particular evening his manner toward Estelle was no different from what it had been the other times; yet, as Del approached them, she felt the electric atmosphere which so often envelops two who love each other, and betrays their secret carefully guarded behind formal manner and indifferent look and tone.  She wondered that she had been blind to what was now obvious.

“Well, Arthur has at last compelled you to go to work,” said she smilingly to the big cooper with the waving tawny hair and the keen, kind gray eyes.  Then, to show her respect for the secret, she said to Estelle, “Perhaps he hasn’t told you that he was made superintendent of the cooperage to-day?”

Estelle blushed a little, her eyes dancing.  “He was just telling me,” replied she.

“I understand why you yielded,” continued Adelaide to Lorry.  “Arthur has been showing me the plans for the new factories.  Gardens all round, big windows, high ceilings, everything done by electricity, no smoke or soot, a big swimming pool for winter or summer, a big restaurant, dressing rooms—­everything!  Who’d have believed that work could be carried on in such surroundings?”

“It’s about time, isn’t it,” said Lorry, in his slow, musical voice, “that idleness was deprived of its monopoly of comforts and luxuries?”

“How sensible that is!” said Del admiringly.  “Yet nobody thinks of it.”

“Why,” Lorry went on, “the day’ll come when they’ll look back on the way we work nowadays, as we do on the time when a lot of men never went out to work except in chains and with keepers armed with lashes.  The fellows that call Dory and Arthur crazy dreamers don’t realize what ignorant savages they themselves are.”

“They have no imagination,” said Estelle.

“No imagination,” echoed Lorry.  “That’s the secret of the stupidity and the horror of change, and of the notion that the way a thing’s done to-day is the way it’ll always be done.”

“I’m afraid Arthur is going to get himself into even deeper trouble when these new plans are announced,” said Del.

Arthur’s revolution had already inflamed the other manufacturers at Saint X against him.  Huge incomes were necessary to the support of their extravagant families and to the increase of the fortunes they were piling up “to save their children from fear of want”—­as if that same “fear of want” were not the only known spur to the natural lethargy of the human animal!  They explained to their workmen that the university industries were