for a workin'-man."

"My name is Marie Louise."

"Moll is enough."

And Moll she was thenceforth.

The understanding of Mamise's task was easier than its performance.
Pafflow sent the rivets to her fast and fleet, and they were red-hot.
The first one passed her and struck Sutton. His language blistered.
The second sizzled against her hip. The third landed in the pail with
a pleasant clink, but she was so slow in getting her tongs about it,
and fitting it into its place, that it was too cold for use. This
threw her into a state of hopelessness. She was ready to resign.

"I think I'd better go back to crocheting," she sighed.

Sutton gave her a playful shove that almost sent her off the
platform:

"Nah, you don't, Moll. You made me chase Snotty off the job, and
you're goin' t'rough wit' it. You ain't doin' no worse 'n I done
meself when I started rivetin'. Cheese! but I spoiled so much work I
got me tail kicked offen me a dozen times!"

This was politer language than some that he used. His conversation was
interspersed with words that no one prints. They scorched Mamise's
ears like red-hot rivets at first, but she learned to accept them as
mere emphasis. And, after all, blunt Anglo-Saxon never did any harm
that Latin paraphrase could prevent.

The main thing was Sutton's rough kindliness, his splendid efficiency,
and his infinite capacity for taking pains with each rivet-head,
hammering it home, then taking up his pneumatic chipping-tool to trim
it neat. That is the genius and the glory of the artisan, to perfect
each detail _ad unguem_, like a poet truing up a sonnet.

Sutton was putting in thousands on thousands of rivets a month, and
every one of them was as important to him as every other. He feared
the thin knife-blade of the rivet-tester as the scrupulous writer
dreads the learned critic's scalpel.

Mamise was dazed to learn that the ship named after her would need
nearly half a million rivets, each one of them necessary to the
craft's success. The thought of the toil, the noise, the sweat,
the money involved made the work a sort of temple-building, and
the thought of Nicky Easton's ability to annul all that devout
accomplishment in an instant nauseated her like a blasphemy. She
felt herself a priestess in a holy office and renewed her flagging
spirits with prayers for strength and consecration.

But few of the laborers had Sutton's pride or Mamise's piety in the
work. Just as she began to get the kn