again.

And, meantime, he conscientiously gave himself to relieving her mind of
the effects of her own feminine foolishness. That queer and undoubtedly
upsetting bit of "crowd psychology" they had seen--that, he pointed out,
had come merely from the unusual heat, the control of the steam-pipes
happening to be out of whack to-day. Such a thing didn't happen once in
six months; so that surly fellow MacQueen had said. Of course, producing
wealth was a hard business at best, let none deny it. Everybody would
like to see factories run on the model theory, like health resorts, but
the truth was that those ideas were mostly wind and water, and had never
worked out yet. An owner must think of his profits first, unfeeling as
that might seem; else he would have to shut up shop, and then where
would those girls be for a living? They needn't work for her father
unless they wanted to, of course....

"You should look into a cannery some day, for sights--by which I mean
that you shouldn't do anything of the sort!... Oh, get us to some
quieter street there, Frederick!... But it was my fault for agreeing to
go with you. I knew, as you couldn't, that a going factory's no place
for a girl delicately brought up. Those women don't mind. That is, as
a rule ..."

Carlisle responded to this sensible treatment with what lightsomeness
she could muster; but the odd truth was that she hardly listened to
Hugo. Heaven knew that she needed the strong sane arguments, heaven knew
that he could state them all unanswerably. And yet, just as she was
aware that her woman's feelings about the bunching-room would have no
weight with Hugo, so she was curiously aware that Hugo's arguments
produced no effect at all upon her. If she had relied upon him as a
demolishing club against Vivian, the over-sympathetic, it appeared that
his strength was not equal to the peculiar demand. And all at once she
seemed to have gotten to know her lover very well; there were no more
surprises in him. She suddenly perceived a strange and hitherto
unsuspected likeness between Hugo and mamma, in that you could not talk
over things with either of them....

"Remember, Cally," he said, summing up, "this is the first factory
you've ever seen in your life. You've nothing at all to judge by, in a
business matter of this sort--"

Something in his tone flicked her briefly out of her resolve not to
argue; but she spoke lightly enough.

"Yes, I judge by the way it made me feel. I judg