IV

"Well, hello you, Mr Webster. This is a fine place for you to be day-dreaming. I've been standing here and looking at you for several minutes and you haven't even seen me."

John Webster jumped to his feet. The afternoon was passing and already there was a kind of greyness falling over the trees and the grass in the little park. The late afternoon sun was shining on the figure of the man who stood before him and, although the man was short of stature and slight, his shadow on the stone walk was grotesquely long. The man was evidently amused at the thought of the prosperous manufacturer day-dreaming there in the park and laughed softly, his body swaying a little back and forth. The shadow also swayed. It was like a thing hung on a pendulum, swinging back and forth, and even as John Webster sprang to his feet a sentence went through his mind. "He takes life with a long slow easy swing. How does that happen? He takes life with a long slow easy swing," his mind said. It seemed like a fragment of a thought snatched out of nowhere, a fragmentary dancing little thought.

The man who stood before him owned a small second-hand book store on a side street along which John Webster was in the habit of walking as he went back and forth to his factory. On summer evenings the man sat in a chair before his shop and made comments on the weather and on passing events to the people going up and down the sidewalk. Once when John Webster was with his banker, a grey dignified-looking man, he had been somewhat embarrassed because the bookseller called out his name. He had never done it until that day and never did it afterward. He had explained the matter to the banker. "I really don't know the man. I was never in his shop," he said.

In the park John Webster stood before the little man deeply embarrassed. He told a harmless lie. "I've had a headache all day and sat down here for a moment," he said sheepishly. It was annoying that he felt like apologizing. The little man smiled knowingly.

"You ought to take something for that. It might get a man like you into a hell of a mess," he said and walked away, his long shadow dancing behind him.

With a shrug of his shoulders John Webster went rapidly through a crowded business street. He was quite sure now that he knew what he wanted to do. He did not loiter and give way to vague thoughts, but walked briskly along the street. "I'll keep my mind occupied," he decided, "I'll think about my business and how to develop it." During the week before, an advertising man from Chicago had come into his office and had talked to him about advertising his washing machine in the big national magazines. It would cost a good deal of money, but the advertising man had said that he could raise his selling price and sell many more machines. That sounded possible. It would make the business a big one, an institution of national prominence, and himself a big figure in the industrial world. Other men had got into a position like that through the power of advertising. Why shouldn't he do the same?