ere," said Madame Bretton, glancing up at Pierre.

"It is all fascinating when you take it as a whole. But if you just do
one part of the work over and over and never connect it with the entire
process, it is tiresome enough. Every workman should consider himself a
link in the big chain, and try to make himself familiar with the other
links. Then he will feel as if he is really doing something, and not
just pegging away day after day as if he were a machine. That is why I
want to learn all I can about silk as a complete industry. It makes
winding bobbins and reeling thread a more important matter. Some firms,
Uncle Adolph says, have moving picture lectures and by means of them
explain to their employees the entire process of their particular
industry so they will be more intelligent about what they are doing. I
think that is a fine thing. Nobody likes to do some uninteresting thing
over and over, week after week and year after year, unless he
understands what he is doing. Even the money you earn doesn't help to
make your work less monotonous. How can employers expect their men to
have any ambition, or any desire to turn out flawless products unless
they realize that each detail of a process makes the perfect whole? I
mean to know every step of the road I am traveling so when I get to the
top----"

"So when you get to the top you can make silk all by yourself,"
interrupted his mother, completing the sentence with a smile.

"Well, I'm going to know how, anyway," nodded Pierre. "And I wish to
learn not only of silks and velvets, but laces, too. Laces are fussy,
difficult, and expensive to make. I want to find out all about them. I
know they have to have the strongest and most perfect thread. In Europe
such goods are made either by hand, or on hand-looms. It is a slow
process at best. But the power machines here, slowly as they are forced
to work, can of course turn out lace much faster than it can be made in
Europe on hand-looms. Consequently the commoner kinds of laces are made
in this country, used, and worn out while they are in fashion; for the
Americans shift their fashions in laces quite as fast as they do their
fashions in silks. Before a certain design can be sent to Europe,
manufactured, and sent back again the vogue for that particular pattern
will have ceased and Americans will be wearing something else. That is
what saves the lace trade for America. It is the same with the making of
lace veils."

"There see