bridge-builders in the world, certainly, but it was always Alexander's
picture that the Sunday Supplement men wanted, because he looked as a
tamer of rivers ought to look. Under his tumbled sandy hair his head
seemed as hard and powerful as a catapult, and his shoulders looked
strong enough in themselves to support a span of any one of his ten
great bridges that cut the air above as many rivers.


After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to his study. It was a large room
over the library, and looked out upon the black river and the row of
white lights along the Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all
what one might expect of an engineer's study. Wilson felt at once
the harmony of beautiful things that have lived long together without
obtrusions of ugliness or change. It was none of Alexander's doing, of
course; those warm consonances of color had been blending and mellowing
before he was born. But the wonder was that he was not out of place
there,--that it all seemed to glow like the inevitable background for
his vigor and vehemence. He sat before the fire, his shoulders deep in
the cushions of his chair, his powerful head upright, his hair rumpled
above his broad forehead. He sat heavily, a cigar in his large, smooth
hand, a flush of after-dinner color in his face, which wind and sun and
exposure to all sorts of weather had left fair and clear-skinned.

"You are off for England on Saturday, Bartley, Mrs. Alexander tells me."

"Yes, for a few weeks only. There's a meeting of British engineers, and
I'm doing another bridge in Canada, you know."

"Oh, every one knows about that. And it was in Canada that you met your
wife, wasn't it?"