They dined together, and Solomonson on champagne rather than chicken. His mind, which had never shown an instant's fatigue, began to glow and sparkle. This enterprise, he declared, was to be only the first of a series of vigorous exploitations. The whole thing warmed him. He would rather make ten thousand by such developments, than a hundred thousand by mere speculation. Trafford had but scratched the surface of his mine of knowledge. "Let's think of other things," said Sir Rupert Solomonson. "Diamonds! No! They've got too many tons stowed away already. A diamond now--it's an absolutely artificial value. At any time a new discovery and one wild proprietor might bust that show. Lord!--diamonds! Metals? Of course you've worked the colloids chiefly. I suppose there's been more done in metals and alloys than anywhere. There's a lot of other substances. Business has hardly begun to touch substances yet, you know, Trafford--flexible glass, for example, and things like that. So far we've always taken substances for granted. On our side, I mean. It's extraordinary how narrow the outlook of business and finance is--still. It never seems to lead to things, never thinks ahead. In this case of rubber, for example----" "When men fight for their own hands and for profit and position in the next ten years or so, I suppose they tend to become narrow." "I suppose they must." Sir Rupert's face glowed with a new idea, and his voice dropped a little lower. "But what a pull they get, Trafford, if perhaps--they don't, eh?" "No," said Trafford with a smile and a sigh, "the other sort gets the pull." "Not _this_ time," said Solomonson; "not with you to spot processes and me to figure out the cost--" he waved his hands to the litter that had been removed to a side table--"and generally see how the business end of things is going...." BOOK THE THIRD MARJORIE AT LONELY HUT CHAPTER THE FIRST SUCCESSES § 1 I find it hard to trace the accumulation of moods and feelings that led Trafford and Marjorie at last to make their extraordinary raid upon Labrador. In a week more things happen in the thoughts of such a man as Trafford, changes, revocations, deflections, than one can chronicle in the longest of novels. I have already in an earlier passage of this story sought to give an image of the confused content of a modern human mind, but that pool was to represent a girl of twenty, and Trafford now was a man of nearly thirty-five, and touching life at a hundred points for one of the undergraduate Marjorie's. Perhaps that made him less confused, but it certainly made him fuller. Let me attempt therefore only the broad outline of his changes of purpose and activity until I come to the crucial mood that made these two lives a little worth telling about, amidst the many thousands of such lives that people are living to-day....