XVI
STEWART ACQUIRES SOME NEW INTERESTS
The same conditions which depressed the steel manufacturers caused slackness and gloom among the architects. First, strikes in the building trades, and then the pinch of hard times had caused stagnation in Stewart Lee's office. This would have given him little concern, had it not been apparent to him that Bennett & Durant were getting more work than he. It was to no purpose that he maintained downtown an air of great activity, that he walked at full speed into the club at luncheon-time, and after luncheon went from the dining-room into the reading-room with the excessively brisk step that he had adopted at the outset of his promising career. Bennett from his table in the corner noted it and smiled cynically.
Stewart's pride was such that to no one but his wife would he confess that he had really nothing to do. From her he made little effort to conceal his discontent. He railed against the town—her native place. "For a man who's not so busy that he has n't time to think, Avalon is the devil," he would grumble. To ride out in the country that had once been so beautiful and was now marred by the blight of human industry afflicted his spirits. It was late autumn. To play golf bored him. To sit at home in front of the monotonous natural gas fire was of all things the dullest. Boston became a word that knelled in Lydia's ears. It was not that he was unmanly in his complaining; he exhibited his dissatisfaction on the whole in very cheerful witticisms, and when he was really bitter it would be in an extravagant diatribe that was not meant
