“What if you do lose money?” said Ellen.

Robert stared at her.  “I beg your pardon?” said he.

“What if you do lose money?”

“A man cannot conduct business on such principles,” replied Robert.  “There would soon be no business to conduct.  You don’t understand.”

“Yes, I do understand fully,” replied Ellen.

Robert looked at her, at the clear, rosy curve of her young cheek, the toss of yellow hair above a forehead as candid as a baby’s, at her little, delicate figure, and all at once such a rage of masculine insistence over all this obstinacy of reasoning was upon him that it was all he could do to keep himself from seizing her in his arms and forcing her to a view of his own horizon.  He felt himself drawn up in opposition to an opponent at once too delicate, too unreasoning, and too beloved to encounter.  It seemed as if the absurdity of it would drive him mad, and yet he was held to it.  He tried to give a desperate wrench aside from the main point of the situation.  He leaned over Ellen, so closely that his lips touched her hair.

“Ellen, let us leave all this,” he pleaded; “let me talk to you.  I had to wait a little while.  I knew you would understand that, but let me talk to you now.”

Ellen sat as rigid as marble.  “I wish to talk of nothing besides the matter at hand, Mr. Lloyd,” said she.  “That is too close to my heart for any personal consideration to come between.”

Chapter LIV

When Robert went home in the winter twilight he was more miserable than he had ever been in his life.  He felt as if he had been assaulting a beautiful alabaster wall of unreason.  He felt as if that which he could shatter at a blow had yet held him in defiance.  The idea of this girl, of whom he had thought as his future wife, deliberately setting herself against him, galled him inexpressibly, and in spite of himself he could not quite free his mind of jealousy.  On his way home he stopped at Lyman Risley’s office, and found, to his great satisfaction, that he was alone, writing at his desk.  Even his stenographer had gone home.  He turned around when Robert entered, and looked at him with his quizzical, yet kindly, smile.

“Well, how are you, boy?” he said.

Robert dropped into the first chair, and sat therein, haunched up as in a lapse of despair and weariness.

“What is the matter?” asked Risley.

“You have heard about the trouble in the factory?”

For answer Risley held up a night’s paper with glaring head-lines.

“Yes, of course it is in the papers,” assented Robert, wearily.

Risley stared at him in a lazily puzzled fashion.  “Well,” he said, “what is it all about?  Why are you so broken up about it?” Risley laid considerable emphasis on the you.

“Yes,” cried Robert, in a sudden stress of indignation.  “You look at it like all the rest.  Why are all the laborers to be petted and coddled, and the capitalists held up to execration?  Good Lord, isn’t there any pity for the rich man without his drop of water, in the Bible or out?  Are all creation born with blinders on, and can they only see before their noses?”