[Footnote A:  Extraordinary as it may seem to the modern reader, this sentiment—­or this ignorance—­was at that time sincerely entertained by men as influential, as powerful, and as closely interested in water power as Baker is here depicted.]

VI

Bob arose rather early the following Sunday, snatched a hasty breakfast and departed.  Baker had been in camp three days.  All at once Bob had taken the young man in strong distaste.  Baker amused him, commanded his admiration for undoubted executive ability and a force of character so dynamic as to be almost brutal.  In a more social environment Bob would still have found him a mighty pleasant fellow, generous, open-hearted, and loyal to his personal friends.  But just now his methods chafed on the sensitiveness of Bob’s new unrest.  Baker was worth probably a couple of million dollars, and controlled ten times that.  He had now a fine house in Fremont, where he had chosen to live, a pretty wife, two attractive children and a wide circle of friends.  Life was very good to him.

And yet, in the perversity and the clairvoyance of his mood, Bob thought to see in Baker’s life something of that same emptiness of final achievement he faced in his own.  This was absurd, but the feeling of it persisted.  Thorne, with his miserable eighteen hundred a year, and his glowing enthusiasm and quick interest seemed to him more worth while.  Why?  It was absurd; but this feeling, too, persisted.

Bob was a healthy young fellow, a man of action rather than of introspection, but now the hereditary twist of his character drove him to attempt analysis.  He arrived at nothing.  Both Baker and Thorne seemed to stand on one ground—­each was satisfied, neither felt that lack of the fulfilling content Bob was so keenly experiencing.  But the streak of feminine divination Bob had inherited from his mother made him understand—­or made him think to understand—­that Baker’s satisfaction was taken because he did not see, while Thorne was working with his eyes open and a full sense of values.  This vague glimpse Bob gained only partially and at length.  It rather opened to him new vistas of spiritual perplexity than offered to him any solution.

He paced rapidly down the length of the lake—­whereon the battered but efficient towing launch lay idle for Sunday—­to the Lake Meadow.  This was, as usual, surrounded by hundreds of campers of all classes.  Bob was known to all of them, of course; and he, in turn, had at least such a nodding acquaintance with them that he could recognize any accretions to their members.  Near the lower end of the meadow, beneath a group of a dozen noble firs, he caught sight of newcomers, and so strolled down that way to see what they could be like.