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 wife; Chris, too - only he let married
women alone, and forgot to pay back the money he borrowed. There
was only one man in the room about whom he was beginning to mistrust
his judgment, and that was his own son.

Perhaps it was because he had so recently come from lands where
millions of boys like Graham were pouring out their young lives
like wine, that Clayton Spencer was seeing Graham with a new vision.
He turned and glanced back into the drawing-room, where Graham, in
the center of that misfit group and not quite himself, was stooping
over Marion Hayden. They would have to face that, of course, the
woman urge in the boy. Until now his escapades had been boyish ones,
a few debts frankly revealed and as frankly regretted, some college
mischiefs, a rather serious gambling fever, quickly curbed. But
never women, thank God.