And now with the approach of the capitalist he knew that at last the
great moment had arrived. The dream of years was to come true and the
darling of Willie's brain, his greatest and most ambitious idea, was to
be made a potent factor in the broad universe. So perfectly did he
understand the quaint, half-shrinking inventor that he knew well no
money, no fame, no praise could mean to him what this recognition
would. Persons were to use the thing he had thought out,--to use it
neither because of friendship nor interest, but because it was a
practical, indispensable article which no mind had previously given to
the world. In the days and weeks Bob had spent in the Spence cottage
it was impossible not to read all this and more in the sensitive,
hungering nature of the man who had worked beside him. Love and
parenthood in its smaller and more specific sense had passed Willie
Spence by, but in their place there had sprung into life a broader
altruism and a larger creative impulse. The children his mind begot
were as much of his blood and marrow as if they had actually been born
of his own flesh; and to have one of them go victoriously forth into
that moving current that reached so far beyond his own humble door
would be like sending a child into battle.
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