mere
manager.

Davidge yelled, with unnecessary voltage:

"Sutton, I want to present you to Miss Webling."

Sutton realized his nakedness like another Adam, and his confusion
confused Marie Louise. She nodded. He nodded. Perhaps he made his
muscles a little tauter.

Davidge had planned to ask Sutton to let Marie Louise try to drive a
rivet, just to show her how hopeless her ambition was, but he dared
not loiter. Marie Louise, feeling silly in the silence, asked,
stupidly:

"So that's a riveter?"

"Yes, ma'am," Sutton confessed, "this is a riveter."

"Oh!" said Marie Louise.

"Well, I guess we'll move on," said Davidge. As conversation, it was
as unimportant as possible, but it had a negative historical value,
since it left Marie Louise unconvinced of her inability to be a
rivetress.

She said, "Thank you," and moved on. Davidge followed. Sutton took up
his work again, as a man does after a woman has passed by, pretending
to be indignant, trying by an added ferocity to conceal his delight.

At a distance Davidge paused to say: "He's a great card, Sutton. He
gets a lot of money, but he earns it before he spends it, and he's my
ideal of a workman. His work comes first. He hogs all the pay the
traffic will bear, but he goes on working and he takes a pride in
being better than anybody else in his line. So many of these infernal
laborers have only one ideal--to do the least possible work and earn
enough to loaf most of the time."

Marie Louise thought of some of Jake Nuddle's principles and wondered
if she had done right in recommending him for a place on Davidge's
pay-roll. She was afraid he would be a slacker, never dreaming that he
would be industrious in all forms of destruction. Jake never demanded
short hours for his conspiracies.

At the top of the unfinished deck Marie Louise forgot Jake and gave
her mind up to admiring Davidge as the father of all this factory. He
led her down, out and along the bottom-land, through bogs, among heaps
of rusty iron, to a concrete building-slip. He seemed to be very
important about something, but she could not imagine what it was. She
saw nothing but a long girder made up of sections. It lay along a flat
sheet of perforated steel--the homeliest contraption imaginable.

"Whatever is all this," she asked,--"the beginning of a bridge?"

"Yes and no. It's the beginning of part of the bridge we're building
across the Atlantic."

"I don't believe that I quite follow you.