john’s wall street disaster was personal. he assumed all liabilities. therefore it did not involve his partners, save that he owed slaymaker and pick nearly half a million dollars on his notes. nor did it touch thane and agnes. he took good care of that.

on the day of his return to pittsburgh he had dinner with them. they had moved again, to a house of their own, one they had built on an unspoiled eminence among some fine old trees. they exhibited it with the pride of children. it was large and expensively made, with an unpretentious air, and one of its features, saved until the last, was an apartment for john. they hardly expected him to adopt it. however, it should be his always, just like that, whenever it might please him to come, and it had pleased them to do it.

the evening meal was no longer supper. it was dinner. thane at last was comfortable in the society of servants, even in the brooding, anonymous presence of a butler.

agnes now was in full bloom. life had touched her in its richest mood. there were moments in which her aura seemed luminous, like a halo; or was that a trick of john’s imagination? he had not seen her for above[317] a year. she was more at ease with him than she had ever been, spontaneous, friendly, quite unreserved, and by the same sign infinitely further away. there was no misunderstanding her way with thane nor thane’s with her. they had achieved the consonance of two principles. they were the two aspects of one thing, separate and inseparable, like right and left, like diameter and circumference. what one thought the other said; what one said the other thought. they conversed without words.

agnes pressed john with questions about the wall street episode. they had read a good deal about it in the newspapers. his narrative left much to be vaguely imagined.

“but you yourself—how did you come out?” she asked. “nobody else appears to have got hurt. what happened to you?” for on that point he had been evasive.

“i did get rubbed a bit,” he said. “don’t worry about it. i’m all right.”

she looked at him thoughtfully.

“tell him what we’ve been doing,” she said, turning to thane.

“remember,” said thane, “you said once we’d see ore go in at the top of a blast furnace and come out rails at the other end of the mill without stopping?”

“yes,” said john, sitting up.

“that gave me an idea,” thane continued. “we’ve done it. it’s experimental yet but we can do it. take the steel ingots straight out of the soaking pit and put them through the rolls with no reheating.”

[318]

“does anybody know it?” john asked.

“just ourselves,” said thane.

agnes took it up there, described the process in detail, and told how thane had evolved it through endless nights of trial and failure. john was amazed at the extent and accuracy of her knowledge. thane anticipated his question.

“she knows,” he said. “she could run a mill.”

it was literally true. john was thrilled to hear how at night, in cap and overalls, she had been going with thane to the mill to watch his experiments. not only did she learn to understand them; she could discuss them technically, and make helpful suggestions. she had taken up the study of metallurgy in a serious way. she spent her days digesting scientific papers in english, french and german and was continually bringing new knowledge to thane’s attention. later to her immense delight she saw phases of this knowledge translate itself through thane’s hands into practice at the mill.

“it’s in the blood,” said john, bound with admiration.

it was a cherishable evening. after dinner they sat on the veranda. below them was a bottomless sea of velvety blackness, with no horizon, no feeling of solid beneath it, sprinkled at random with lights and intermittently torn by flashes from blast furnaces and converters many miles away.

“it’s like looking at the sky upside down,” said agnes.

they could feel what was taking place off there in[319] the lamp-black darkness. men were tormenting the elements, parting iron from his natural affinities, giving him in new marriage without love or consent, audaciously creating what god had forgotten—steel! steel! steel! there in that smutted deep were tools walking about like fabled monsters, obedient and docile, handling flaming ingots of metal with the ponderous ease and precision of elephants moving logs. there amid clangor and confusion shrieking little bipeds were raising gigantic ominous shapes from shapelessness. there an epic was forming.

these three sitting on the veranda were definitely related to all of this. it had never ceased to thrill them. much of it they had imagined before it was there. some of those leviathan tools were thane’s own. he was thinking of them, not boastfully, yet with a swelling sense of having created them. they were his ectoplasm, his arms and legs and sinews externalized in other forms. seldom did he review his work, being normally too much absorbed in the difficulty at hand. now, as he gave way to it, a tingle of satisfaction stole through his blood. it made him wish to touch agnes. his hand reached for hers and it was near. she seemed to know what he was thinking.

john was thinking of the steel age, of what it yet required, of its still unimagined possibilities. every railroad then existing would have to be rebuilt with heavier rails and bridges. cars would come to be made of steel. street railways were a new thing: they would take immense quantities of steel.

they had been silent for a long time.

[320]

“that’s the agnes plant ... way over there ... that blue flame. there!” said thane.

“i had made it out,” said john.

“what did you call it?” agnes asked.

sheepishly they told her that from the beginning, for luck, they had called it the agnes plant.

“how nice!” she said.

from that their conversation became more personal, even reminiscent. they found they could speak naturally of incidents always until then taboo. they talked of enoch, of their arrival and beginning in pittsburgh, of the mill at damascus which was doing well, and of each other, how they had changed and what it was like to be all grown up.

when agnes rose to leave she shook hands with john, saying: “alexander will give you the key. we don’t press you. but it’s there for you whenever you have the impulse to come. day or night. any time. and even if you never come it will please us to keep it always ready for you.”

with that she was gone, so suddenly that john had been unable to get any words together. he had not even said good-night.

“that place we’ve fixed for you means something,” said thane, lunging out of a silence. “i can’t find any way to say it. we know how it was when you brought us to pittsburgh and how there wasn’t any job for us until you bought the little nail mill. we know all about it. it’s lucky for all of us,—lucky for agnes and me, i mean,—i didn’t know enough to see it then. there ain’t no way to say how we feel about[321] it. you can just understand that’s what this key means.”

john took it, turned it over in his hand, then put it in his pocket and said nothing.

“the reason agnes was asking you so close how you came out in wall street,” thane added, “was we thought you might-a got skinned. we’ve got a lot of money. we think it’s a lot. and we want you to know—”

“don’t!” said john. “that’s enough. now stop it. stop it, i tell you.”

“a-l-l right, a-l-l right,” said thane. “i’m through. i ain’t a going on, am i? i’ve got it all said.”

“i’m going,” said john. “walk down to the gate.”

at the gate they shook hands and lingered.

“you’ve got it all wrong,” said john. “there’s nothing you two—what i mean—”

“i know, i know,” said thane.

“you don’t know anything,” said john. “let me say something. i owe you a damn sight more than you owe me. i couldn’t have done anything without you. you’re the axle tree. i’m only the wheel. this one new wrinkle, if it proves out, is worth millions.”

“well, don’t lose that key,” said thane.

they shook hands again and pushed each other roughly away.