As a matter of fact, he had not slept well. The stateroom seemed full of those elusive flower-fragrances that always made him think of her, particularly sweet peas--a beautiful flower, and of such delicate colors, he now remembered, who had not thought of them for years. He really loved them, he now discovered. Their odor always tinged his. thoughts with a vague spirit of romance; and this, in turn, in some subtle way, rendered him more susceptible to the lure of adventure. It almost made him feel like a boy.
For all the stimulating reaction of his cold plunge, Tom looked a trifle tired about the eyes at breakfast.
Mr. Merriwether looked at his son with eyes that also looked tired; said, "Good morning, Tom!" in his usual tone of voice, and hid behind his newspaper. Instead of reading about the absurd demands of the railroad workers all over the United States for higher wages, he was thinking that he had never allowed anybody to do his work for him, because he had always intended that Tom should succeed him. He had at one time fully intended to train Tom for the succession, to have him learn railroading from brake-man up.
Indeed, the boy after leaving college had seemed much taken with the idea and listened with interest to his father's talks about his plans and desires and hopes. But with the great boom, that wonderful era of amazing reorganizations and stupendous consolidations, the great little man had been swamped by the flood of gold that poured into Wall Street.
And gold, as usual, had been ruthless in its demands on the great little man's time. For years he had averaged a net personal profit of a million a month; but it was not that he wished to make more money. It was that his time no longer belonged to himself; it was not his family's, but his associates'--not his only son's, but his many syndicates'. And he had devoted himself to the welfare of his syndicates and had written a dazzling page in the annals of Wall Street.
But what about his son's present and the future of the Merriwether roads? If Tom died, the Merri-wether dream would follow him, but that would be a natural death at the hands of God. If Tom lived and refused to be a Merriwether, the death of the Merriwether dreams would be by slow strangulation. In short, hell!