“It would be so dreadful, Mademoiselle. Her grandfather--” “But not handsome,” insisted Mademoiselle, “and lame! Also, I know the child. She is not in love. When that comes to her we shall know it.” Grace lay back, relieved, but not entirely comforted. “She is changed, isn't she, Mademoiselle?” Mademoiselle shrugged her shoulders. “A phase,” she said. She had got the word from old Anthony, who regarded any mental attitude that did not conform with his own as a condition that would pass. “A phase, only. Now that she is back among familiar things, she will become again a daughter of the house.” “Then you think this talk about marrying beneath her--” “She 'as had liberty,” said Mademoiselle, who sometimes lost an aspirate. “It is like wine to the young. It intoxicates. But it, too, passes. In my country--” But Grace had, for a number of years, heard a great deal of Mademoiselle's country. She settled herself on her pillows. “Call Castle, please,” she said. “And--do warn her not to voice those ideas of hers to her grandfather. In a country pharmacy, you say?” “And lame, and not fond of women,” corroborated Mademoiselle. “Ca ne pourrait pas etre mieux, n'est-ce pas?” CHAPTER II Shortly after the Civil War Anthony Cardew had left Pittsburgh and spent a year in finding a location for the investment of his small capital. That was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel. The iron business had already laid the foundations of its future greatness, but steel was still in its infancy. Anthony's father had been an iron-master in a small way, with a monthly pay-roll of a few hundred dollars, and an abiding faith in the future of iron. But he had never dreamed of steel. But “sixty-five” saw the first steel rail rolled in America, and Anthony Cardew began to dream. He went to Chicago first, and from there to Michigan, to see the first successful Bessemer converter. When he started east again he knew what he was to make his life work. He was very young and his capital was small. But he had an abiding faith in the new industry. Not that he dreamed then of floating steel battleships. But he did foresee steel in new and various uses. Later on he was experimenting with steel cable at the very time Roebling made it a commercial possibility, and with it the modern suspension bridge and the elevator. He never quite forgave Roebling. That failure of his, the difference only of a month or so, was one of the few disappointments of his prosperous, self-centered, orderly life. That, and Howard's marriage. And, at the height of his prosperity, the realization that Howard's middle-class wife would never bear a son. The city he chose was a small city then, yet it already showed signs of approaching greatness. On the east side, across the river, he built his first plant, a small one, with the blast heated by passing through cast iron pipes, with the furnaceman testing the temperature with strips of lead and zinc, and the skip hoist a patient mule.