"Ready-made clothing, and well made, too, I’m told."
"Yes, but you couldn’t get in if he didn’t need it. He only wants it to complete some improvements he’s begun. He’s perfectly well-grounded, but I suppose he has to keep up with the progress of the trade. Of course, that very element of family pride might disincline him to give an outsider any hold on the business, but if you want me to, I’ll have Croy—that’s the man that runs our estate for us—look into the situation and sound Forbes."
Luke, after some satisfactory inquiries in other quarters, acquiesced in this proposal. All the reports were good, and that of Herbert Croy, the shriveled Ruysdael lawyer, was especially rosy. Forbes expressed his willingness to meet Luke, and Luke called at the offices of the R. H. Forbes & Son’s factory in Brooklyn.
The present head of the firm was a grave man with a direct and unassuming manner. His aquiline nose gave his face the air of strength, and his mustache and the hair about his temples being slightly touched with gray, he seemed sober and conservative. He sat at a plain roll-top desk, in a room simply furnished, and he lost no time in coming at once to business.
"Would you like to walk through the place?" he inquired, when he had told Luke much of what Ruysdael had already said.
"I suppose I ought to," smiled Luke; "though of course I don’t know enough about the business to appreciate what you show me."
"You are no different, then," he said, "from most modern investors, or, for the matter of that, most owners of businesses either. In these times the average president of a company thinks he earns his salary by manipulating its stock; he seldom knows anything about the work that makes the stock marketable. Our firm isn’t like that."
Under Forbes’s care, Luke was accordingly taken through the factory, with which, he noted, the office of the chief administrative was in close touch. He was shown the room where the cloth manufacturers brought their products; the scales to weigh the material; the windmill-like machine that spread the offered fabric on its wide arms and, turning at the will of the expert buyers, displayed its burden before the examiners in a strong north light; the long boards on which, having been re-rolled, the cloth, once its quality had been thus determined, was again uncoiled, an ingenious contrivance attached to the uncoiling-wheel stamping its measurements at every fifth revolution.