Eileen became interested in Robert Maper, for the old books he opened up to her were quite new and enlarging.  She had imagined the Church replacing Paganism as light replaced darkness.  Now she felt that it was only as gas replaced candle-light.  The darkness was less Egyptian than the nuns insinuated.  Plato in particular was a veritable chandelier.  It occurred to her suddenly that he might be on the black list.  But she was afraid to ask her Confessor for fear of hearing her doubt confirmed.  To tell the good father of the semi-secret meetings in the library would have been superfluous, since there was nothing to conceal even from Mrs. Maper, though that lady did not happen to know of them.  Eileen did not even use the garden door.  Besides, there was never a formal appointment, not infrequently, indeed, a disappointment, when the library held nothing but books.  Robert Maper merely provided that possibility of an innocent double life, without which existence would have been too savourless for Eileen.  Even a single line of railway always appeared dismal to her; she liked the great junctions with their bewildering intertanglements, their possibilities of collision.  And now that Lieutenant Doherty had faded away into Afghanistan and silence—­he did not even acknowledge the letter announcing her approaching marriage—­Robert Maper proved a useful substitute.

One day Mr. Maper senior invited her to drive down with him and go over the factory, and as Mrs. Maper was not averse from impressing her employee by the sight of the other employes, she was permitted to go.  Nothing, however, would induce Mrs. Maper to adventure herself in these scenes of her early life, touching which she professed a sovereign ignorance.  “Machines are so clattery,” she said.  “My head wouldn’t stand them.  I once went to that exhibition in London and I said to myself, never no more for this gal.”

“And you never did go any more since you were a girl?” asked the companion, with professional pointedness.

“No, never no more,” replied Mrs. Maper, serenely, “once is too often, as the gal said when the black man kissed her.”

Eileen laughed dutifully at this quotation from the latest comic opera, and went off, delighted to companion the husband by way of change.  He proved quite a new man, too, in his own element, bringing the most complicated machinery to the level of her understanding.  Room after room they passed through, department after department full of tireless machinery, and tired men and women, who seemed slaves to the whims of fantastic iron monsters, all legs and arms and wheels.  It took a morning to see everything, down to the pasting and drying and packing rooms, and as a last treat Mr. Maper took her to the engine-room, whence he said came the power that turned those myriad wheels, moved those myriad levers, in whatever department they might be and whatever their function.  Eileen gazed long at the mighty engine, rapt in reverie.  She could scarcely tear herself away, and when at last Mr. Maper brought her into the counting-house, she had forgotten that she must meet his son there.  The white-browed clerk in corduroys did not, however, raise his eyes from his ledger, and Eileen was grateful to him for preserving the piquancy of their relation.