Presently he went on, down the road. But he went differently.
Adriance had not spent half a year in the mill, even in the limited capacity of chauffeur, without observing many things. He had come to recognize flaws in that smooth-running mechanism of which he was a part. Might he not find in this fact an opportunity? He saw much that he himself, given authority, might do to promote efficiency. He did not delude himself with the idea that he could go into any factory as an efficiency expert; he did see that here he might fairly earn and ask for a salary that would give Elsie more luxuries than she had even known in her own home and more than he himself had learned to desire. After all, there had been no quarrel between his father and himself. When the young man had chosen a course that he knew to be disagreeable to the older, he simply had withdrawn from their life together as a matter of courtesy and self-respect. Since he no longer gave what was expected of Tony Adriance, he could not take Tony's privileges; now however, knowledge of Elsie had changed the situation. His father had only to meet his wife, Anthony felt assured, for his marriage to explain itself. Even if Mr. Adriance were disappointed by the simplicity of his son's choice and ambitions, even if he preferred the brilliant Mrs. Masterson to the serene young gentlewoman as a daughter-in-law, why should there be rancor between the two men? For the first time it occurred to Adriance that his father might be lonely and welcome a reconciliation. They never had been intimate, but they had been companions, or at least pleasant acquaintances. The house on the Drive had not contained only servants, as now it must--servants who were merely servants, too, not the faithful, devoted, tactful servitors of romance, but the average modern hireling. The house-keeper engaged and dismissed them and was herself a shadowy automaton, who appeared only to receive special orders and render monthly accounts. For any atmosphere of home created in the house, the Adriances might as well have been established in a hotel. Anthony wondered if even Elsie could leaven that dense mass of formality, or if her art was too delicate, too subtle a combination of heart and mind and personality to affect such conditions. He could not be certain. He could well imagine her, daintily gowned and demurely self-possessed, as mistress of that household; but he could not imagine the household itself as altered very much or made less stupidly ponderous by her presence. He had not thought of this before, but now he could not think his pleasure would be quite the same if they sat together in state in that drawing-room he knew so well, while she told him the tales he had learned to delight in. It could not be quite the same as a hearth of their own, and his pipe, burning with a coarse, outrageous energy, expressed in volumes of smoke, while Elsie leaned forward, little hands animated, gray eyes sparkling, and mimicked or drolled or sang as the mood swayed them or the tale demanded. He knew that he himself could never read aloud with enthusiasm and verve if Mr. Adriance listened with amused criticism. No, Anthony realized with some astonishment that he did not want to take his wife home.