Jay had been allowed to "work" in the shipping room, sometimes hammering long nails into box covers, sometimes delightfully and proudly daubing black paint through the stencils; but put on his honor, consequent to the discovery of certain private experiments, not to ride crates down the chutes.
Here upon maps of the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia were the spots of bright-headed pins showing Rountree shipping points. Here, that impulse of proprietorship stirred unwittingly by Lida, when she had laughed at him in Tryston, whipped up in him at the thought of a definite threat to these things.
"There's no way to figure the factory running without the Alban order, or the Metten order to replace it," Ellen Powell had put the threat into words for him.
The plant closed and silent; the shiny chutes empty; the switch-track deserted by the tooting engine; no boxes and crates, in shipment to New York, London, Paris, Buenos Aires, Singapore, or Tokio. The pins in the map of the two hemispheres would represent past performance only in the Rountree family; the Slengels, in their map, would thrust fresh, triumphant pins.
Jay's pulses pricked with the instinct of fight for these things; it was the feeling that Lida summed up in her epithet of the "Chicago" in him. It was amusing and irrational, when you got outside yourseli—if ever you really got outside yourself—to assert that Jay Rountree should stay in Chicago, because he had been born here, and set to selling these things, because his father and grandfather had made them. The Jay Rountree on the
