Alone after Walter leaves, Adams knows he is the bigger fool, because he could not tell the boy the truth. He could not even state his case at its best, because at its best it was a bad one. Twenty-five years ago, wanting his young wife to see how much J. A. Lamb trusted him, he told her a secret. Lamb wanted a cheap liquid glue that would really stick, and set Adams and a chemist named Campbell to find it in a shed outside town. They did. Campbell asked why it should not be theirs, since it had cost Lamb little. Adams was horrified: Lamb paid them, so it was Lamb's. That summer Campbell died of typhoid, leaving the unwritten formula in two heads. Lamb, distracted by a cough lozenge and other hobbies, never built the factory, and in time seemed to forget glue altogether.
His wife did not forget. It was really his, she argued; Campbell left no family, and what good was it doing buried? Adams answered with examples. If Lamb hired him to saw wood, would the sticks be his? If you paid a cook to make soup, could she sell it? His only reason, he said, was decency. They never found a meeting point, and the question is no more settled now that he has given in.
On Monday he sells his bonds, arranges a mortgage on the house, and takes a taxicab to see Charley Lohr, the only man at Lamb's who has been there longer than he has. Lohr is amazed. He remembers a rumour about Adams and Campbell working privately on glue, and warns that the old man, generous as he is, would sell both his hands to stop anyone getting the better of him. Adams insists his process will be improved and different. He asks Lohr to hand Lamb a letter personally, with a cheque returning the salary paid during his illness. Then, looking above his friend's head, he asks him to put in a good word for him, if he ever feels like it. Afterwards Lohr tells his wife that Adams had better have stayed in bed.
That night, struggling over the letter, Adams hears Alice coming up the stairs, singing softly. Mr. Russell called, she says, and she did all the talking. Asked what he said, she laughs 'Not what you think!', kisses her father and curtsies into her room. He goes back to the letter with a lighter heart, because what he is doing is for her. Then he wonders. She seems happy as things are. Why did he take this step at all? He cannot go back now, though he cannot quite see why.
Coming Up in Chapter 17
The next morning Adams is out in his taxicab again, and by noon he has what he wants. For years he swore he would never take this step, yet his plans are ready in every detail, as if part of him had been preparing all along. He knows exactly where to go: a long brick shed in a muddy lot.
