but with the boom times on the lakes, his interests were beginning to expand. I met him frequently in the next few years, and we became close friends."
Sherrill broke off and stared an instant down at the rug. Alan bent forward; he made no interruption but only watched Sherrill attentively.
"It was one of the great advantages of the West, I think—and particularly of Chicago at that time—that it gave opportunity for friendships of that sort," Sherrill said. "Corvet was a man of a sort I would have been far less likely ever to have known intimately in the East. He was both what the lakes had made him and what he had made of himself; a great reader—wholly self-educated; he had, I think, many of the attributes of a great man—at least, they were those of a man who should have become great; he had imagination and vision. His whole thought and effort, at that time, were absorbed in furthering and developing the traffic on the lakes, and not at all from mere desire for personal success. I met him for the first time one day when I went to his office on some business. He had just opened an office at that time in one of the old ramshackle rows along the river front; there was nothing at all pretentious about it—the contrary, in fact; but as I went in and waited with the others who were there to see him, I had the sense of being in the ante-room of a great man. I do not mean there was any idiotic pomp or lackyism or red tape about it; I mean that the others who were waiting to see him, and who knew him, were keyed up by the anticipation and keyed me up. . . .
"I saw as much as I could of him after that, and our friendship became very close.
