Welles brought to the company what it needed and the presidency brought to Welles many opportunities--none of which he neglected. He saw the deposits increase tenfold--and his own fortune twentyfold. What might not have been politic in an individual playing a lone hand was altogether admirable in the head of a financial institution--his cold-bloodedness, for example, and the dehumanized attitude toward life habitually assumed by the principal cog-wheel in that intricate aggregation of cog-wheels known as a modern trust company. Being an excellent money-lender, he was an uninteresting human being. You lose much when you win money--for gold is hard and cold, and the enjoyment of life calls for softness and warmth. It is the appalling revenge capital takes on its self-called masters.
As he approached his fiftieth year Welles began to find that his isolation might be splendid, but that it was also damnably uncomfortable. Did you know that in certain millionaire households, where everything always runs very smoothly, the master gets to long for a burnt steak or the spilling of soup by the very competent servant? Welles, accustomed to the wonderfully comfortable life of a very rich bachelor in New York, desired a home where everything need not be so comfortable. And as his fortune became a matter of several millions it began--as swollen fortunes always do, also in revenge!--to take on the aspect of a monument, something to admire during the monument-builder's lifetime and to endure impressively afterward! With the desire of permanence came the dream of all capitalists that makes them dynasts of gold--an heir to extend the boundaries of the family fortune! It was inevitable that Ashton Welles should grow to believe that, though the trust company's deposits were in other people's names, they really belonged to Ashton Welles, because they were merely the marble blocks of the Welles monument. The name of Welles must never cease to be identified with the work of Ashton the First!
Wherefore the need of an heir became almost an obsession with him, and with it came a quite human dissatisfaction with hotels and clubs, and trained nurses in times of illness. When a capitalist realizes clearly that, apart from his money-lending capacity, he has absolutely no power to bring tears to human eyes, he grows jealous of his own money. He wishes to be feared, though penniless, just as he would be loved, though a pauper. All these desires combined to force Ashton Welles into a decision. He had kept up a desultory sort of friendship with Mrs. Deering, the widow of his predecessor in the presidency of the trust company, and Anne Deering was the girl he knew best of all--though he really did not know her at all.