In spite of this aloofness and alertness, for the first time in her life Janet felt the exuberance of being in touch with affairs of import.  Hitherto the mill had been merely a greedy monster claiming her freedom and draining her energies in tasks routine, such as the copying of meaningless documents and rows of figures; now, supplied with stimulus and a motive, the Corporation began to take on significance, and she flung herself into the work with an ardour hitherto unknown, determined to make herself so valuable to Ditmar that the time would come when he could not do without her.  She strove to memorize certain names and addresses, lest time be lost in looking them up, to familiarize herself with the ordinary run of his correspondence, to recall what letters were to be marked “personal,” to anticipate matters of routine, in order that he might not have the tedium of repeating instructions; she acquired the faculty of keeping his engagements in her head; she came early to the office, remaining after hours, going through the files, becoming familiar with his system; and she learned to sort out his correspondence, sifting the important from the unimportant, to protect him, more and more, from numerous visitors who called only to waste his time.  Her instinct for the detection of book-agents, no matter how brisk and businesslike they might appear, was unerring—­she remembered faces and the names belonging to them:  an individual once observed to be persona non grata never succeeded in passing her twice.  On one occasion Ditmar came out of his office to see the back of one of these visitors disappearing into the corridor.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“His name is McCalla,” she said.  “I thought you didn’t want to be bothered.”

“But how in thunder did you get rid of him?” he demanded.

“Oh, I just wouldn’t let him in,” she replied demurely.

And Ditmar went away, wondering....  Thus she studied him, without permitting him to suspect it, learning his idiosyncrasies, his attitude toward all those with whom daily he came in contact, only to find herself approving.  She was forced to admit that he was a judge of men, compelled to admire his adroitness in dealing with them.  He could be democratic or autocratic as occasion demanded; he knew when to yield, and when to remain inflexible.  One morning, for instance, there arrived from New York a dapper salesman whose jauntily tied bow, whose thin hair—­carefully parted to conceal an incipient baldness—­whose wary and slightly weary eyes all impressively suggested the metropolitan atmosphere of high pressure and sophistication from which he had emerged.  He had a machine to sell; an amazing machine, endowed with human intelligence and more than human infallibility; for when it made a mistake it stopped.  It was designed for the express purpose of eliminating from the payroll the skilled and sharp-eyed women who are known as “drawers-in,” who sit all day long under a north light patiently threading the ends of the warp through the heddles of the loom harness.  Janet’s imagination was gradually fired as she listened to the visitor’s eloquence; and the textile industry, which hitherto had seemed to her uninteresting and sordid, took on the colours of romance.