“Hasn’t it occurred to you that you are in it, that you’ve been right in the middle of it all along?”

He gave her one of his original looks, and said:  “Well, I can’t say it had....  But it’s where I’d rather be than anywhere else in the world.”

“You can make nice speeches, at any rate....  Do you know you’re the strangest man, I believe, that ever lived?”

“No, that’s news.  Am I?...  Well, in what way am I so strange?”

“Oh, it’s a long, long story.  But I’m going to tell it all to you some day....  Do go on and help me about the floors.  Papa won’t.  He didn’t seem to like my speaking about them at all.  He says they’d hold hundreds more machines if he only had the room—­”

“Well, he knows....  He’s—­he’s had the strain figured out.  Of course.”

So had Time, the master-humorist, reversed positions between Heths and Vivians.  The old Arraigner, for his part, seemed to feel now that, to all intents and purposes, papa had put up the building six years ago....

But Cally explained how floors and machines had got upon her nerves.  This was, she said, our first point to settle.  And thereupon the young man at once addressed himself to the question of remedies; sketching with his finger on the table-top, till she got note-paper and pencils from mamma’s desk in the corner, switched light into a reading-lamp, and came and sat down beside him.  On the paper V.V. obligingly produced an outline of the three floors of the present factory, accurately locating stairway and elevator shaft; even the point where the cloak-room was to be knocked out to give the space needed for the new machines....

“How in the world do you know so much about the Works?”

“Oh—­well, you see, the shipping clerk there is quite a friend of mine,” said V.V.  “A very nice fellow, sort of a Lithuanian, named Dolak.  Don’t be offended, but I—­I’ve been down there once or twice at night.”

However, he seemed stumped as to the best method of support, admitting that it was not so simple as it seemed.  And presently, when he had tried and condemned columns from floor to floor, the girl said, hesitatingly: 

“Dr. Vivian, do you think props—­outside—­would do any good?”

He turned his intent gaze upon her; he was frowning absorbedly and looking rather doubtful about it all.

“I mean iron braces running from the ground on each side of the building,” said Cally—­“and holding up girders, or whatever you call them, under the bunching-room floor?”

He gazed a moment, and then exclaimed: 

“Oh—­good! Oh, that’s good!...  That would do it—­do it perfectly!...”

He proceeded with eagerness to sketch in her square-arch braces under his bunching-room floor, and he said again:  “Perfect solution!...  Why, you ought to have been a builder!”

“Oh, I—­just happened to see a picture of something like that in the encyclopaedia this afternoon.”