"Now you can see for yourself," said he, "where I live." He laughed. "I'm one of the few people who haven't got a bad word to say of the Standard Oil Co. They give me more cubic feet of private space, bigger cabin space, and better food than any shipowner across the water. They give me any mortal thing for my engines except time to overhaul them. The newspapers tell me they're a blood-sucking trust battening on the body-politic, and so on. Personally ..." and Mr. Carville drew the stopper from a square bottle, "personally, I find them very decent people to work for." I sat looking at him for some time as he busied himself with a drawer which contained, he assured me, an apollinaris. It struck me that though he had gained in certain external trappings of the mind since entering his room, he had ceased to appear to me as a heroic figure. Even the perception which had appreciated the grandeur of New York, the wit which had connected St. George with _San Giorgio Maggiore_, seemed to me incongruous with the present phase of his character. Quite possibly I had been so drilled in hatred of Standard Oil that I unconsciously revolted from the notion that any good could come out of that protean enterprise! And yet, when I reflected, I could not but wonder whether, after all, he, in his quiet efficiency, his sober sense, and his deliberate renunciation of the glory of romance, was not as logical a product of our modern age as the corporation he served. "You serve both God and Mammon," I remarked as the soda-water splashed into the glass. He nodded, smiling. "Yes," he said, "or rather let us call it rendering unto Caesar. After all, something must bend if you are going to make ends meet. Caesar," he added, lifting up his glass, "isn't such a bad proposition when you have a family to provide for." I agreed that this was so and scanned the books on the shelves. They at least were a noble company, their gold and green and blue broken by the plain yellow paper backs of Italian books. Shakespeare was there and St. Francis of Assisi; _Fors Clavigera_ in a cabinet edition; Symonds' _Renaissance_ and Pater in wide-margined dignity. Tucked in corners, too, were books in that quaint pocket edition of the _Bibliotheque Nationale_: _Rabelais_, in five volumes, Beaumarchais' _Memoirs_, Rousseau, Scarron's _Travesty of Virgil_ and that extraordinary work of genius, The _Maxims_ of La Rochefoucauld. As I turned them over I saw on their pages the purple rubber-stamps of some bookseller in Tunis, Bizerta, Tangier, and other places even more obscure. I had a vision of the man making his way, in some perspiration, through the press of Arabs and Moors to the little shop under the arches. I saw him scanning the shelves, the Derby hat pushed back, the vest open, the thumb and finger pinching the lower lip.... I turned to him with a worn copy of _Heine_ in my hand.