Once he suggested the purchase of dictating machines.

“Fol-de-rol,” said his father, brusquely—­and the matter ended.

In Lightener’s plant he saw lathes which roughed and finished in one process and one handling.  In his own plant castings must pass from one machine to another, and through the hands of extra and unnecessary employees.  It was economic waste.  But he offered no suggestion.  He saw time lost here, labor lavished there, but he was indifferent.  He knew better.  He knew how it should be done—­but he did not care. ...  The methods of Bonbright Foote I not only suited his father, but were the laws of his father’s life.

Not only had Bonbright established sympathetic relations with Malcolm Lightener, but with Lightener’s family.  In Mrs. Lightener he found a woman whose wealth had compelled the so-called social leaders of the city to accept her, but whose personality, once she was accepted, had won her a firm, enduring position.  He found her a woman whose sudden, almost magical, change from obscurity and the lower fringe of salary-drawers to a wealth that made even America gasp, had not made her dizzy.  Indeed, it seemed not to have affected her character at all.  Her dominant note was motherliness.  She was still the housewife.  She continued to look after her husband and daughter just as she had looked after them in the days when she had lived in a tiny frame house and had cooked the meals and made the beds. ...  She represented womanhood of a sort Bonbright had never been on terms of intimate friendship with. ...  There was much about her which gave him food for reflection.

And Hilda. ...  Since their first meeting there had been no reference to the desire of their mothers for their marriage.  For a while the knowledge of this had made it difficult for Bonbright to offer her his friendship and companionship.  But when he saw, as the weeks went by, how she was willing to accept him unaffectedly as a friend, a comrade, a chum, how the maternal ambition to unite the families seemed to be wholly absent from her thoughts, they got on delightfully.

Bonbright played with her.  Somehow she came to represent recreation in his life.  She was jolly, a splendid sportswoman, who could hold her own with him at golf or tennis, and who drove an automobile as he would never have dared to drive.

She was not beautiful, but she was attractive, and the center of her attractiveness was her wholesomeness, her frankness, her simplicity. ...  He could talk to her as he could not talk even to her father, yet he could not open his heart fully even to her.  He could not show her the soul tissues that throbbed and ached.

He was lonely.  A lonely boy thrown with an attractive girl is a fertile field for the sowing of love.  But Bonbright was not in love with Hilda. ...  The idea did not occur to him.  There was excellent reason—­though he had not arrived at a realization of it, and this excellent reason was Ruth Frazer.