Even to-day, with the living presence of Sally still in my eyes, I was filled again with the old unappeasable desire for the great railroad. The woman and the road were distinct and yet blended in my thoughts. At dinner-time, when the General hobbled to his buggy on my arm, I made again the remark I had blurted out so inopportunely. "General, I've been to West Virginia and started the plant, and we're going to give Hail Columbia to our competitors." He looked at me attentively, and a sly twinkle appeared in his little watery grey eyes, which were sunk deep in the bluish and swollen sockets. "Do you feel yourself getting big, Ben?" he enquired, with a chuckle. I shook my head. "Not yet, but it's a fair risk and a good chance to make a big business." "Well, you're right, I suppose, and if you ain't you'll find out before long. What's luck, after all, but the thing that enables a man to see a long way ahead?" He settled himself under his fur rug, flicked the reins over the old grey horse, and we drove slowly up Main Street behind a street car. "I don't know about luck, General, but I'm going to win out if hard pushing can do it." "It can do 'most anything if you only push hard, enough. But you talk as if you were in love, Ben, I've said the same thing a hundred times in my day, I reckon." I blushed furiously, and then turning my face from him, stared at a group of children upon the sidewalk. "Whom could I marry, General?" I asked. "You know well enough that a woman in your class wouldn't marry a man in mine--unless--" "Unless she were over head and heels in love with him," he chuckled. "Unless he were a great man," I corrected. "You mean a rich man, Ben? So your oil business is merely a little love attention, after all." "No, money has very little to do with it, and the woman I want to marry wouldn't marry me for money. But it's the mettle that counts, and in this age, given the position I've started from, how can a man prove his mettle except by success?--and success does mean money. The president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad is obliged to be a rich man, isn't he?" "So you're still after my job, eh? Is that why you've let me bully and badger you for the last six years?" "It was at the bottom of it," I answered honestly, for the gay old bird liked downright speaking, and I knew it. "I'd rather have been your confidential secretary for six years than general manager of traffic. I was learning what I wanted to know." "And what was that?" "The way you did things. The way you handled men and bought and sold stocks." "You like the road, too, eh?" "I like the road as long as it can be of use to me." "And when it ceases to be you'll throw it over?" "Yes, if it ever ceases to be I'll throw it over--honestly," I answered.