“He smells nice,” she thought, missing nothing of this.

“You’ve never seen my daughter, have you?” asked Josiah.

“A little queen,” said the young man with a brilliant smile.  “I hope I’ll see her often.”

“That’s Uncle Stanley’s son Burdon,” said Josiah when he had left.  “He’s just through college; he’s going to start in the office here.”

Mary liked to hear that, and always after that she looked for Burdon and watched him with an interest that had something of fascination in it.

Before she was ten, she and Josiah had become old chums.  She knew the factory by the river almost as well as she knew the house on the hill.  Not only that but she could have told you most of the processes through which the bearings passed before they were ready for the shipping room.

To show you how her mind worked, one night she asked her father, “What makes a machine squeak?”

“Needs oil,” said Josiah, “generally speaking.”

The next Saturday morning she not only kept her eyes open, but her ears as well.

Presently her patience was rewarded.

“Squee-e-eak!  Squee-e-eak!” complained a lathe which they were passing.  Mary stopped her father and looked her very old-fashionedest at the lathe hand.

“Needs oil,” said she, “gen’ly speaking.”

It was one of the proud moments in Josiah’s life, and yet when back of him he heard a whisper, “Chip of the old block,” he couldn’t repress the well nigh passionate yearning, “Oh, Lord, if she had only been a boy!”

That year an addition was being made to the factory and Mary liked to watch the builders.  She often noticed a boy and a dog sitting under the trees and watching, too.

Once they smiled at each other, the boy blushing like a sunset.  After that they sometimes spoke while Josiah was talking to the foreman.  His name, she learned, was Archey Forbes, his father was the foreman, and when he grew up he was going to be a builder, too.  But no matter how often they saw each other, Archey always blushed to the eyes whenever Mary smiled at him.

Occasionally a man would be hurt at the factory.  Whenever this happened, Aunt Patty paid a weekly call to the injured man until he was well—­an old Spencer custom that had never died out.

Mary generally accompanied her aunts on these visits—­which was a part of the family training—­and in this way she saw the inside of many a home.

“I wouldn’t mind being a poor man,” she said one Saturday morning, breaking a long silence, “but I wouldn’t be a poor woman for anything.”

“Why not?” asked Miss Cordelia.

She couldn’t tell them why but for the last half hour she had been comparing the lives of the men in the factory with the lives of their wives at home.

“A man can work in the factory,” she tried to tell them, “and everything is made nice for him.  But his wife at home-now—­nobody cares—­nobody cares what happens to her—­”