It was perhaps nine o’clock when I left the station.  Our way was along the boulevard which hugged the side of one of the city’s great hills.  Far below, to the left, lay the railroad tracks and the seventy times seven looming stacks of the mills.  The white mist of the river, the grays and blacks of the smoke blended into a half-revealing haze, dotted here and there with fire.  It was unlovely, tremendous.  Whistler might have painted it with its pathos, its majesty, but he would have missed what made it infinitely suggestive—­the rattle and roar of iron on iron, the rumble of wheels, the throbbing beat, against the ears, of fire and heat and brawn welding prosperity.

Something of this I voiced to the grim old millionaire who was responsible for at least part of it.  He was propped up in bed in his East end home, listening to the market reports read by a nurse, and he smiled a little at my enthusiasm.

“I can’t see much beauty in it myself,” he said.  “But it’s our badge of prosperity.  The full dinner pail here means a nose that looks like a flue.  Pittsburg without smoke wouldn’t be Pittsburg, any more than New York without prohibition would be New York.  Sit down for a few minutes, Mr. Blakeley.  Now, Miss Gardner, Westinghouse Electric.”

The nurse resumed her reading in a monotonous voice.  She read literally and without understanding, using initials and abbreviations as they came.  But the shrewd old man followed her easily.  Once, however, he stopped her.

“D-o is ditto,” he said gently, “not do.”

As the nurse droned along, I found myself looking curiously at a photograph in a silver frame on the bed-side table.  It was the picture of a girl in white, with her hands clasped loosely before her.  Against the dark background her figure stood out slim and young.  Perhaps it was the rather grim environment, possibly it was my mood, but although as a general thing photographs of young girls make no appeal to me, this one did.  I found my eyes straying back to it.  By a little finesse I even made out the name written across the corner, “Alison.”

Mr. Gilmore lay back among his pillows and listened to the nurse’s listless voice.  But he was watching me from under his heavy eyebrows, for when the reading was over, and we were alone, he indicated the picture with a gesture.

“I keep it there to remind myself that I am an old man,” he said.  “That is my granddaughter, Alison West.”

I expressed the customary polite surprise, at which, finding me responsive, he told me his age with a chuckle of pride.  More surprise, this time genuine.  From that we went to what he ate for breakfast and did not eat for luncheon, and then to his reserve power, which at sixty-five becomes a matter for thought.  And so, in a wide circle, back to where we started, the picture.

“Father was a rascal,” John Gilmore said, picking up the frame.  “The happiest day of my life was when I knew he was safely dead in bed and not hanged.  If the child had looked like him, I—­well, she doesn’t.  She’s a Gilmore, every inch.  Supposed to look like me.”