I have digressed....  Mr. Scherer unfolded his scheme, talking about “units” as calmly as though they were checkers on a board instead of huge, fiery, reverberating mills where thousands and thousands of human beings toiled day and night—­beings with families, and hopes and fears, whose destinies were to be dominated by the will of the man who sat opposite me.  But—­did not he in his own person represent the triumph of that American creed of opportunity?  He, too, had been through the fire, had sweated beside the blasts, had handled the ingots of steel.  He was one of the “fittest” who had survived, and looked it.  Had he no memories of the terrors of that struggle?...  Adolf Scherer had grown to be a giant.  And yet without me, without my profession he was a helpless giant, at the mercy of those alert and vindictive lawmakers who sought to restrain and hamper him, to check his growth with their webs.  How stimulating the idea of his dependence!  How exhilarating too, the thought that that vision which had first possessed me as an undergraduate—­on my visit to Jerry Kyme—­was at last to be realized!  I had now become the indispensable associate of the few who divided the spoils, I was to have a share in these myself.

“You’re young, Paret,” Mr. Scherer concluded.  “But Watling has confidence in you, and you will consult him frequently.  I believe in the young men, and I have already seen something of you—­so?"...

When I returned to the office I wrote Theodore Watling a letter expressing my gratitude for the position he had, so to speak, willed me, of confidential legal adviser to Adolf Scherer.  Though the opportunity had thrust itself upon me suddenly, and sooner than I expected it, I was determined to prove myself worthy of it.  I worked as I had never worked before, making trips to New York to consult leading members of this new branch of my profession there, trips to Washington to see my former chief.  There were, too, numerous conferences with local personages, with Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Grierson, and Judah B. Tallant,—­whose newspaper was most useful; there were consultations and negotiations of a delicate nature with the owners and lawyers of other companies to be “taken in.”  Nor was it all legal work, in the older and narrower sense.  Men who are playing for principalities are making war.  Some of our operations had all the excitement of war.  There was information to be got, and it was got—­somehow.  Modern war involves a spy system, and a friendly telephone company is not to be despised.  And all of this work from first to last had to be done with extreme caution.  Moribund distinctions of right and wrong did not trouble me, for the modern man labours religiously when he knows that Evolution is on his side.