captain of industry of us all!" Westerling would only
have thought: "Certainly. I am chief of staff. I am at the head of all
your workmen at one time or another!" Had he heard the banker's answer,
"But pretty poor pay, pretty small dividends!" he would have thought:
"Splendid dividends--the dividends of power!"

He had a caste contempt for the men of commerce, with their mercenary
talk about credit and market prices; and also for the scientists,
doctors, engineers, and men of other professions, who spoke of things in
books which he did not understand. Reading books was one of the faults
of Turcas, his assistant. No bookish soldier, he knew, had ever been a
great general. He resented the growing power of these leaders of the
civil world, taking distinction away from the military, even when, as a
man of parts, he had to court their influence. His was the profession
that was and ever should be the elect. A penniless subaltern was a
gentleman, while he could never think of a man hi business as one.

All the faces in the street belonged to a strange, busy world outside
his interest and thoughts. They formed what was known as the public,
often making a clatter About things which they did not understand, when
they Should obey the orders of their superiors. Of late, their clatter
had been about the extra taxes for the recent increase of the standing
forces by another corps. The public was bovine with a parrot's head. Yet
it did not admire the toiling ox, but the eagle and the lion.

As his car came to the park his eyes lighted at sight of one of the
dividends--one feature of urban life that ever gave him a thrill. A
battalion of the 128th, which he had ordered that afternoon to the very
garrison at South La Tir that he had once commanded, was marching
through the main avenue. Youths all, of twenty-one or two, they were in
a muddy-grayish uniform which was the color of the plain as seen from
the veranda of the Galland house.

Around them, in a mighty, pervasive monotone, was the roar of city
traffic, broken by the nearer sounds of the cries of children playing in
the sand piles, the bark of motor horns, the screech of small boys'
velocipedes on the paths of the park; while they themselves were silent,
except for the rhythmic tramp of the military shoes of identical
pattern, as was every article of their clothing and equipment from head
to foot, whose character had been the subject of the weightiest
deliberation of the staff.