ig, cluttered place
heaped high with piles of curiously shaped pieces of wood, filled with
oddly contrived saws and lathes and knives and buffers for sawing and
turning and polishing and fitting those bits of wood, was brooded over
as by something palpable by an emanation of order. Mr. Welles did not
understand a detail of what he was looking at, but from the whole, his
mind, experienced in business, took in a singularly fresh impression
that everybody there knew what he was up to, in every sense of the word.

He and Mr. Crittenden stood for a time looking at and chatting to a
gray-haired man who was polishing smoothly planed oval bits of board. He
stopped as they talked, ran his fingers over the satin-smoothed surface
with evident pleasure, and remarked to his employer, "Mighty fine maple
we're getting from the Warner lot. See the grain in that!"

He held it up admiringly, turning it so that the light would show it at
its best, and looked at it respectfully. "There's no wood like maple,"
he said. Mr. Crittenden answered, "Yep. The Warner land is just right
for slow-growing trees." He took it out of the workman's hand, looked it
over more closely with an evident intelligent certainty of what to look
for, and handed it back with a nod that signified his appreciation of
the wood and of the workmanship which had brought it to that state.

There had been about that tiny, casual human contact a quality which Mr.
Welles did not recognize. His curiosity rose again. He wondered if he
might not succeed in getting some explanation out of the manufacturer,
if he went about it very tactfully. He would wait for his chance. He
began to perceive with some surprise that he was on the point of quite
liking Mrs. Crittenden's husband.

So he tried another question, after a while, very cautiously, and was
surprised to find Mr. Crittenden no longer snappish, but quite friendly.
It occurred to him as the pleasantest possibility that he might find his
liking for the other man returned. That _would_ be a new present hung on
the Christmas tree of his life in Vermont.

On the strength of this possibility, and banking on the friendliness in
the other man's eyes, he drove straight at it, the phrase which the
minister had used when he said that Mr. Crittenden thought of business
as an ideal service to humanity as much as doctoring. That had sounded
so ignorant and ministerial he hadn't even thought of it seriously, till
after this contact with