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To Bibbs's knowledge, no one and nothing had ever prevented his father from carrying through his plans, once he had determined upon them; and Sheridan was incapable of believing that any plan of his would not work out according to his calculations. His nature unfitted him to accept failure.
It was a dingy afternoon, and the smoke was evident not only to Bibbs's sight, but to his nostrils, though most of the pedestrians were so saturated with the smell they could no longer detect it. Nearly all of them walked hurriedly, too intent upon their destinations to be more than half aware of the wayside; they wore the expressions of people under a vague yet constant strain.
Bibbs's mother had a feeling about him then that she had never known before; it was indefinite and vague, but very poignant something in her mourned for him uncomprehendingly. She felt that an awful thing had been done to him, though she did not know what it was. She went up to his room. The fire George had built for him was almost smothered under thick, charred ashes of paper.
The sky had become only a dingy thickening of the soiled air; and a roar and clangor of metals beat deafeningly on Bibbs's ears.
It is a curious half-void, a glimpse of aphasia; and although the person experiencing it may not know for that instant his own name or age or sex, he may be acutely conscious of depression or elation. It is the moment, as we say, before we "remember"; and for the first time in Bibbs's life it came to him bringing a vague happiness.
He was strange to his father, but his father was not strange to him. He knew that Sheridan's plans were conceived in the stubborn belief that they would bring about a good thing for Bibbs himself; and whatever the result was to be, the son had no bitterness. Far otherwise, for as he looked at the big, woeful figure, shaking and tortured, an almost unbearable pity laid hands upon Bibbs's throat.
Bibbs gazed for a while at the fire; then he rose abruptly, like a man who has come to a decision, and briskly sought the room it was called "the smoking-room" where Edith sat with Mr. Lamhorn. They looked up in no welcoming manner, at Bibbs's entrance, and moved their chairs to a less conspicuous adjacency.
She did; and Bibbs's cheeks showed a little actual color, which Mary perceived. It recalled to her, by contrast, her careless and irritated description of him to her mother just after she had seen him for the first time. "Rather tragic and altogether impossible." It seemed to her now that she must have been blind.
But as he passed Bibbs's door he heard from within the sound of a cheerful young voice humming jubilant fragments of song: WHO looks a mustang in the eye?... With a leap from the ground To the saddle in a bound. And away and away! Hi-yay!
Now here's Bibbs. There are thousands of men fit for the life you want him to lead and so is he. It wouldn't take half of Bibbs's brains to be twice as good a business man as Jim and Roscoe put together." "WHAT!" Sheridan goggled at him like a zany.
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