introducing him to a new world of men: methodical,
hard-thinking Germans, emotional, dreaming Russians,
analytical, courageous Norwegians, Spaniards and Italians
with their sense of beauty, and blundering, hopeful
Englishmen wanting so much and getting so little;
so that at the end of the evening he went out of her
presence feeling strangely small and insignificant
against the great world background she had drawn for
him.
Sam did not understand Janet’s point of view.
It was all too new and foreign to everything life
had taught him, and in his mind he fought her ideas
doggedly, clinging to his own concrete, practical thoughts
and hopes, but on the train homeward bound, and in
his own room later, he turned over and over in his
mind the things she had said and tried in a dim way
to grasp the bigness of the conception of human life
she had got sitting in a wheel chair and looking down
into Wabash Avenue.
Sam loved Janet Eberly. No word of that had ever
passed between them and he had seen her hand flash
out and grasp the shoulder of Jack Prince when she
was laying down to him some law of life as she saw
it, as it had so often shot out and grasped his own,
but had she been able to spring out of the wheel chair
he should have taken her hand and gone with her to
the clergyman within the hour and in his heart he
knew that she would have gone with him gladly.
Janet died suddenly during the second year of Sam’s
work for the gun company without a direct declaration
of affection from him, but during the years when they
were much together he thought of her as in a sense
his wife and when she died he was desolate, overdrinking
night after night and wandering aimlessly through
the deserted streets during hours when he should have
been asleep. She was the first woman who ever
got hold of and stirred his manhood, and she awoke
something in him that made it possible for him later
to see life with a broadness and scope of vision that
was no part of the pushing, energetic young man of
dollars and of industry who sat beside her wheeled
chair during the evenings on Wabash Avenue.
After Janet’s death, Sam did not continue his
friendship with Edith, but turned over to her the
ten thousand dollars to which the six thousand of
Janet’s money had grown in his hands and did
not see her again.
One night in April Colonel Tom Rainey of the great
Rainey Arms Company and his chief lieutenant, young
Sam McPherson, treasurer and chairman of the board
of directors of the company, slept together in a room
in a St. Paul hotel. It was a double room with
two beds, and Sam, lying on his pillow, looked across
the bed to where the colonel’s paunch protruding
itself between him and the light from a long narrow
window, made a round hill above which the moon just
peeped. During the evening the two men had sat
for several hours at a table in the grill down stairs
