Del approached them, she felt the electric atmosphere which so often
envelops two who love each other, and betrays their secret carefully
guarded behind formal manner and indifferent look and tone. She wondered
that she had been blind to what was now obvious.

"Well, Arthur has at last compelled you to go to work," said she
smilingly to the big cooper with the waving tawny hair and the keen, kind
gray eyes. Then, to show her respect for the secret, she said to Estelle,
"Perhaps he hasn't told you that he was made superintendent of the
cooperage to-day?"

Estelle blushed a little, her eyes dancing. "He was just telling me,"
replied she.

"I understand why you yielded," continued Adelaide to Lorry. "Arthur has
been showing me the plans for the new factories. Gardens all round, big
windows, high ceilings, everything done by electricity, no smoke or soot,
a big swimming pool for winter or summer, a big restaurant, dressing
rooms--everything! Who'd have believed that work could be carried on in
such surroundings?"

"It's about time, isn't it," said Lorry, in his slow, musical voice,
"that idleness was deprived of its monopoly of comforts and luxuries?"

"How sensible that is!" said Del admiringly. "Yet nobody thinks of it."

"Why," Lorry went on, "the day'll come when they'll look back on the way
we work nowadays, as we do on the time when a lot of men never went out
to work except in chains and with keepers armed with lashes. The fellows
that call Dory and Arthur crazy dreamers don't realize what ignorant
savages they themselves are."

"They have no imagination," said Estelle.

"No imagination," echoed Lorry. "That's the secret of the stupidity and
the horror of change, and of the notion that the way a thing's done
to-day is the way it'll always be done."

"I'm afraid Arthur is going to get himself into even deeper trouble when
these new plans are announced," said Del.

Arthur's revolution had already inflamed the other manufacturers at Saint
X against him. Huge incomes were necessary to the support of their
extravagant families and to the increase of the fortunes they were piling
up "to save their children from fear of want"--as if that same "fear of
want" were not the only known spur to the natural lethargy of the human
animal! They explained to their workmen that the university industries
were not business enterprises at all, and therefore must not be confused
and compared with enterprises that were "practic