Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/67

Rh activities, a tremendous pressure of will along undetermined lines. He had no wish to take the manager’s place; but his dream was to see Truscomb superseded by a man of the new school, in sympathy with the awakening social movement—a man sufﬁciently practical to “run” the mills successfully, yet imaginative enough to regard that task as the least of his duties. He saw the promise of such a man in Louis Duplain, the overseer who boarded with Mrs. Amherst: a young fellow of Alsatian extraction, a mill-hand from childhood, who had worked at his trade in Europe as well as in America, and who united with more manual skill, and a greater nearness to the workman’s standpoint, all Amherst’s enthusiasm for the experiments in social betterment that were making in some of the English and continental factories. His strongest wish was to see such a man as Duplain in control at Westmore before he himself turned to the larger work which he had begun to see before him as the sequel to his factory-training.

All these thoughts swept through him in the instant’s pause before Mrs. Westmore, responding to his last appeal, said with a graceful eagerness: “Yes, you must come tonight. I want to hear all you can tell me—and if there is anything wrong you must show me how I can make it better.”

“I’ll show her, and Truscomb shan’t turn me out [ 55 ]