made me speak like that," she was thinking. "I must be
more dignified--or he'll think I'm bold...." And in a very dignified
voice indeed, she said, "I must be getting back now. I wish you'd find
the contractor and ask him when he'll be through."

She went down the hill alone. On the way a queer thought came to her. I
sha'n't attempt to explain it--only to report it.

"Of course it isn't the only thing in life--that's ridiculous," she
thought. "But sooner or later ... I guess it becomes quite important...."

CHAPTER XXX

A few hours later, Mary was sitting in her office, thinking of this and
that (as the old phrase goes) when a knock sounded on the door and the
elderly accountant entered.

"We have finished the first part of our work," he said, "that dealing
with factory costs. I will leave this with you and when you have read it,
I would like to go over it with you in detail."

It was a formidable document, nearly three hundred typewritten pages,
neatly bound in hard covers. Mary hadn't looked in it far when she knew
she was examining a work of art.

"How he must love his work!" she thought, and couldn't help wondering
what accidental turn of life had guided his career into the field of
figures.

"How interesting he makes it!" she thought again. "Why, it's almost like
a novel."

Brilliant sentences illuminated nearly every page. "This system,
admirable in its way, is probably a legacy from the past, when the
bookkeepers of Spencer & Son powdered their hair and used quill pens.--"
"Under these conditions, a stock clerk must become a prodigy and depend
upon his memory. When memory fails he must become a poet, for he has
nothing but imagination to guide him." "Thus one department would
corroborate another, like two witnesses independently sworn and each
examined in private--"

The back of the volume, she noticed, was filled with tables of figures.
"This won't be so interesting," she told herself, turning the leaves. But
suddenly she stopped at one of the open pages--and read it again--and
again--

"Comparative Efficiency of Men's Labour and Women's Labour," the sheet
was headed. And there it was in black and white, line after line, just
how much it had cost to make each Spencer bearing when the men did the
work, and just how much it was costing under the new conditions.

"There!" said Mary, "I always knew we could do it, if the women in Europe
could! There! No wonder we've been making so much money l