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That is what Jesse hungered for and then also he
hungered for something else. He had grown into
maturity in America in the years after the Civil War
and he, like all men of his time, had been touched
by the deep influences that were at work in the
country during those years when modem industrialism
was being born. He began to buy machines that
would permit him to do the work of the farms while
employing fewer men and he sometimes thought
that if he were a younger man he would give up
farming altogether and start a factory in Winesburg
for the making of machinery. Jesse formed the habit
of reading newspapers and magazines. He invented
a machine for the making of fence out of wire.
Faintly he realized that the atmosphere of old times
and places that he had always cultivated in his own
mind was strange and foreign to the thing that was
growing up in the minds of others. The beginning
of the most materialistic age in the history of the
world, when wars would be fought without patriotism,
when men would forget God and only pay
attention to moral standards, when the will to power
would replace the will to serve and beauty would
be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush
of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions,
was telling its story to Jesse the man of God as it
was to the men about him. The greedy thing in him
wanted to make money faster than it could be made
by tilling the land. More than once he went into
Winesburg to talk with his son-in-law John Hardy
about it. "You are a banker and you will have
chances I never had," he said and his eyes shone.
"I am thinking about it all the time. Big things are
going to be done in the country and there will be
more money to be made than I ever dreamed of.
You get into it. I wish I were younger and had your
chance." Jesse Bentley walked up and down in the
bank office and grew more and more excited as he
talked. At one time in his life he had been threatened
with paralysis and his left side remained somewhat
weakened. As he talked his left eyelid twitched.
Later when he drove back home and when night
came on and the stars came out it was harder to get
back the old feeling of a close and personal God
who lived in the sky overhead and who might at
any moment reach out his hand, touch him on the
shoulder, and appoint for him some heroic task to
be done. Jesse's mind was fixed upon the things
read in newspapers and magazines, on fortunes to
be made almost without effort by shrewd men who
bought and sold. For him the coming of the boy
David did much to bring back with renewed force
the old faith and it seemed to him that God had at
last looked with favor upon him.
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