ne pourrait pas etre mieux, n'est-ce pas?"


CHAPTER II


Shortly after the Civil War Anthony Cardew had left Pittsburgh and
spent a year in finding a location for the investment of his small
capital. That was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel.
The iron business had already laid the foundations of its future
greatness, but steel was still in its infancy.

Anthony's father had been an iron-master in a small way, with a
monthly pay-roll of a few hundred dollars, and an abiding faith in
the future of iron. But he had never dreamed of steel. But
"sixty-five" saw the first steel rail rolled in America, and Anthony
Cardew began to dream. He went to Chicago first, and from there to
Michigan, to see the first successful Bessemer converter. When he
started east again he knew what he was to make his life work.

He was very young and his capital was small. But he had an abiding
faith in the new industry. Not that he dreamed then of floating
steel battleships. But he did foresee steel in new and various uses.
Later on he was experimenting with steel cable at the very time
Roebling made it a commercial possibility, and with it the modern
suspension bridge and the elevator. He never quite forgave Roebling.
That failure of his, the difference only of a month or so, was one
of the few disappointments of his prosperous, self-centered, orderly
life. That, and Howard's marriage. And, at the height of his
prosperity, the realization that Howard's middle-class wife would