Page 162 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

process which was now largely used and was known by his
name. You might have seen it in the newspapers in connec-
tion with this fruitful contrivance; assurance of which he
had given to Isabel by showing her in the columns of the
New York Interviewer an exhaustive article on the Good-
wood patent—an article not prepared by Miss Stackpole,
friendly as she had proved herself to his more sentimental
interests. There were intricate, bristling things he rejoiced
in; he liked to organize, to contend, to administer; he could
make people work his will, believe in him, march before
him and justify him. This was the art, as they said, of man-
aging men—which rested, in him, further, on a bold though
brooding ambition. It struck those who knew him well that
he might do greater things than carry on a cotton-factory;
there was nothing cottony about Caspar Goodwood, and
his friends took for granted that he would somehow and
somewhere write himself in bigger letters. But it was as if
something large and confused, something dark and ugly,
would have to call upon him: he was not after all in har-
mony with mere smug peace and greed and gain, an order
of things of which the vital breath was ubiquitous advertise-
ment. It pleased Isabel to believe that he might have ridden,
on a plunging steed, the whirlwind of a great war—a war
like the Civil strife that had overdarkened her conscious
childhood and his ripening youth.
She liked at any rate this idea of his being by character
and in fact a mover of men—liked it much better than some
other points in his nature and aspect. She cared nothing for
his cotton-mill—the Goodwood patent left her imagination

162 The Portrait of a Lady