The more I reflect upon those days, the more surprising does it seem that I was not in love with her.  It may be that I was, unconsciously, for she troubled my thoughts occasionally, and she represented all the qualities I admired in her sex.  The situation that had existed at the time of our first and only quarrel had been reversed, I was on the highroad to the worldly success I had then resolved upon, Nancy was poor, and for that reason, perhaps, prouder than ever.  If she was inaccessible to others, she had the air of being peculiarly inaccessible to me—­the more so because some of the superficial relics of our intimacy remained, or rather had been restored.  Her very manner of camaraderie seemed paradoxically to increase the distance between us.  It piqued me.  Had she given me the least encouragement, I am sure I should have responded; and I remember that I used occasionally to speculate as to whether she still cared for me, and took this method of hiding her real feelings.  Yet, on the whole, I felt a certain complacency about it all; I knew that suffering was disagreeable, I had learned how to avoid it, and I may have had, deep within me, a feeling that I might marry her after all.  Meanwhile my life was full, and gave promise of becoming even fuller, more absorbing and exciting in the immediate future.

One of the most fascinating figures, to me, of that Order being woven, like a cloth of gold, out of our hitherto drab civilization,—­an Order into which I was ready and eager to be initiated,—­was that of Adolf Scherer, the giant German immigrant at the head of the Boyne Iron Works.  His life would easily lend itself to riotous romance.  In the old country, in a valley below the castle perched on the rack above, he had begun life by tending his father’s geese.  What a contrast to “Steeltown” with its smells and sickening summer heat, to the shanty where Mrs. Scherer took boarders and bent over the wash-tub!  She, too, was an immigrant, but lived to hear her native Wagner from her own box at Covent Garden; and he to explain, on the deck of an imperial yacht, to the man who might have been his sovereign certain processes in the manufacture of steel hitherto untried on that side of the Atlantic.  In comparison with Adolf Scherer, citizen of a once despised democracy, the minor prince in whose dominions he had once tended geese was of small account indeed!

The Adolf Scherer of that day—­though it is not so long ago as time flies—­was even more solid and impressive than the man he afterwards became, when he reached the dizzier heights from which he delivered to an eager press opinions on politics and war, eugenics and woman’s suffrage and other subjects that are the despair of specialists.  Had he stuck to steel, he would have remained invulnerable.  But even then he was beginning to abandon the field of production for that of exploitation:  figuratively speaking, he had taken to soap, which with the aid of water may be blown into beautiful, iridescent bubbles