After all these years of thinking in terms of cattle and soil, it was nice to feel there was somebody in whom he might be interested, at least for a little while. Maybe if he found a job for her, she would be willing to be friendly when she got to know him better. She seemed like the kind of a girl his mother would have liked.

Then he set himself to seriously consider how he would go about locating that job for her. It seemed as serious as the fortune he had promised himself that he would make when he went west. The fortune had come true, though not at all by his endeavors.

But the more that he considered the more he realized that it was not going to be an easy matter to locate a job for a strange girl in a strange city with nothing, absolutely nothing to go on.

While he was waiting for his dinner order to arrive, he took out his notebook and wrote down the names of people whom he remembered who used to be friends of his mother and who were in business. He thought of going to some of them, but he began to realize that it was going to be awkward, perhaps embarrassing both for him and the girl. How, for instance, was he to explain the girl and why he was after a job for her? It was ten years since he had met any of these businessmen he was thinking of. They might not even recognize him. They had little to remember to particularly recommend him either. He had been just a willful, wild boy when he went away. They probably had all disapproved of him for not following their advice. No, it would be better to go to strangers for help.

He bought an evening paper and set himself to study the want advertisements but was struck with the scarcity of them. Moreover, the paper was full of talk of the unemployed. It appeared that employment was a problem and that there was such a thing as a depression enveloping the land.

It hadn’t reached to his wilderness home. It was always depression there. It was something he had expected, and it didn’t bother him. It was only astonishing that it had been lifted so suddenly and so fully in his case. Instead of just taking his money as something that would make him independent for life, something that he was to absorb in his own selfish plans and pursuits, why oughtn’t he to make that money work for others, in part at least? Perhaps that was why he had such an indifference toward trying to seek amusement for himself. Perhaps he was meant to enter into a scheme that would help others, and only through others could he really get the whole pleasure that his money was meant to give. Perhaps there was a business somewhere that he would buy or set up that would employ a lot of despairing ones. Almost every column of the paper had some story of a suicide or death or desperation of someone who was depressed because of business conditions. That was a terrible state of things. Why, there must be other people besides himself who had a little money. Why didn’t they think out a way to make that money work for others as well as themselves? Not just give it away, for then soon it would be gone, but keep it going in a continual circuit to make profit both for its owner and for those who were employed through it? Well, there must be a way. He would have to think it out.

He wished he had a few good, wise friends to talk this matter over with. He had come back into a world that seemed to be sick and sad and confused. He couldn’t remember that things had been this way when he went away. But he had been only a kid and perhaps didn’t understand. Still the papers spoke as if this was something comparatively new, this depression. Of course there had been more or less talk about it for the last year or two in the very few papers that had come his way, but he had not taken in the real purport of it.