The car was soaked in blood.  But she didn’t lose consciousness, that child didn’t.  She’s dead now.  She’s buried.  Her body that she meant to use so profusely for her own delights is squeezed up in the little black box in the dark and the silence, down below where the spring can’t get at it....  I had no sleep for two nights.  On the second day a doctor at the hospital said that I must take at least three months’ holiday.  He said I’d had a nervous breakdown.  I didn’t know I had, and I don’t know now.  I said I wouldn’t take any holiday, and that nothing would induce me to.”

“Why, Con?”

“Because I’d sworn, absolutely sworn to myself, to stick that job till the war was over.  You understand, I’d sworn it.  Well, they wouldn’t let me on to the works.  And yesterday one of the directors brought me up to town himself.  He was very kind, in his Clyde way.  Now you understand what I mean when I say I’m ruined.  I’m ruined with myself, you see.  I didn’t stick it.  I couldn’t.  But there were twenty or thirty girls who saw the accident.  They’re sticking it.”

“Yes,” he said in a voice soft and moved, “I understand.”  And while he spoke thus aloud, though his emotion was genuine, and his desire to comfort and sustain her genuine, and his admiration for her genuine, he thought to himself:  “How theatrically she told it!  Every effect was studied, nearly every word.  Well, she can’t help it.  But does she imagine I can’t see that all the casualness was deliberately part of the effect?”

She lit a cigarette and leaned her half-draped elbows on the tea-table, and curved her ringed fingers, which had withstood time and fatigue much better than her face; and then she reclined again on the chaise-longue, on her back, and sent up smoke perpendicularly, and through the smoke seemed to be trying to decipher the enigmas of the ceiling.  G.J. rose and stood over her in silence.  At last she went on: 

“The work those girls do is excruciating, hellish, and they don’t realise it.  That’s the worst of it.  They’ll never be the same again.  They’re ruining their health, and, what’s more important, their looks.  You can see them changing under your eyes.  Ours was the best factory on the Clyde, and the conditions were unspeakable, in spite of canteens, and rest-rooms, and libraries, and sanitation, and all this damned ‘welfare’.  Fancy a girl chained up for twelve hours every day to a thundering, whizzing, iron machine that never gets tired.  The machine’s just as fresh at six o’clock at night as it was at six o’clock in the morning, and just as anxious to maim her if she doesn’t look out for herself—­more anxious.  The whole thing’s still going on; they’re at it now, this very minute.  You’re interested in a factory, aren’t you, G.J.?”

“Yes,” he answered gently, but looked with seemingly callous firmness down at her.

“The Reveille Company, or some such name.”

“Yes.”

“Making tons of money, I hear.”