there is to be said. You're the one who has to live in it, you know. Now
my father likes a room----"

And while I looked gloomily over the water she told me what her father
liked.

* * * * *

He came out from the city each evening by train. He refused to use the
boat these days, he said he was so infernally busy that he could not
spare the time. He brought out stacks of papers and plans which had
piled up while he was abroad, and with these he busied himself at night.
And though Eleanore from the veranda glanced in at him frequently, she
never again caught him looking old. And when she went in to make him
stop working he smilingly told her to leave him alone. He smoked many
cigars with apparent enjoyment, his lean face wrinkling over the smoke
as he turned over plan after plan for the harbor. His manner to me was
if anything even kindlier than before. He began calling me "Billy" now.

On the last night of my stay he said:

"I think you're the man I've been looking for. I've just read your story
and you've done exactly what I hoped. You've pictured one spot of
efficiency in a whole dreary desert of waste. Come up to my office
to-morrow at ten."

CHAPTER XV

So at last I went up to the tower.

His office took up an entire floor near the tapering top of the
building, and as we walked slowly around the narrow steel balcony
outside, a tremendous panorama unrolled down there before our eyes. We
could see every part of the port below stretching away to the horizon,
and through Dillon's powerful field glass I saw pictures of all I had
seen before in my weary weeks of trudging down there in the haze and
dust. Down there I had felt like a little worm, up here I felt among the
gods. There all had been matter and chaos, here all was mind and a will
to find a way out of confusion. The glass gave me the pictures in swift
succession, in a moment I made a leap of ten miles, and as I listened on
and on to the quiet voice at my elbow, the pictures all came sweeping
together as parts of one colossal whole. The first social vision of my
life I had through Dillon's field glass.

"To see any harbor or city or state as a whole," he said, "is what most
Americans cannot do. And it's what they've got to learn to do."

And while I looked where he told me to, like a surgeon about to operate
he talked of his mighty patient, a giant struggling to breathe, with
swollen veins and arteries. He made me