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.
But now the boy was through with college, and already he noticed
something new in their relationship. Natalie had always spoiled him, and
now there were, with increasing frequency, small consultations in her
room when he was shut out, and he was beginning to notice a restraint in
his relations with the boy, as though mother and son had united against
him.
He was confident that Natalie was augmenting Graham's allowance from her
own. His salary, rather, for he had taken the boy into the business, not
as a partner--that would come later--but as the manager of a department.
He never spoke to Natalie of money. Her house bills were paid at the
office without question. But only that day Miss Potter, his secretary,
had reported that Mrs. Spencer's bank had called up and he had made good
a considerable overdraft.
He laid the cause of his discontent to Graham, finally. The boy had
good stuff in him. He was not going to allow Natalie to spoil him, or
to withdraw him into that little realm of detachment in which she lived.
Natalie did not need him, and had not, either as a lover or a husband,
for years. But the boy did.