“Now I’ve made up my mind we’ll place one with you, Mr. Ditmar,” the salesman concluded.  “I don’t object to telling you we’d rather have one in the Chippering than in any mill in New England.”

Janet was surprised, almost shocked to see Ditmar shake his head, yet she felt a certain reluctant admiration because he had not been swayed by blandishments.  At such moments, when he was bent on refusing a request, he seemed physically to acquire massiveness,—­and he had a dogged way of chewing his cigar.

“I don’t want it, yet,” he replied, “not until you improve it.”  And she was impressed by the fact that he seemed to know as much about the machine as the salesman himself.  In spite of protests, denials, appeals, he remained firm.  “When you get rid of the defects I’ve mentioned come back, Mr. Hicks—­but don’t come back until then.”

And Mr. Hicks departed, discomfited....

Ditmar knew what he wanted.  Of the mill he was the absolute master, familiar with every process, carrying constantly in his mind how many spindles, how many looms were at work; and if anything untoward happened, becoming aware of it by what seemed to Janet a subconscious process, sending for the superintendent of the department:  for Mr. Orcutt, perhaps, whose office was across the hall—­a tall, lean, spectacled man of fifty who looked like a schoolmaster.

“Orcutt, what’s the matter with the opener in Cooney’s room?”

“Why, the blower’s out of order.”

“Well, whose fault is it?"....

He knew every watchman and foreman in the mill, and many of the second hands.  The old workers, men and women who had been in the Chippering employ through good and bad times for years, had a place in his affections, but toward the labour force in general his attitude was impersonal.  The mill had to be run, and people to be got to run it.  With him, first and last and always it was the mill, and little by little what had been for Janet a heterogeneous mass of machinery and human beings became unified and personified in Claude Ditmar.  It was odd how the essence and quality of that great building had changed for her; how the very roaring of the looms, as she drew near the canal in the mornings, had ceased to be sinister and depressing, but bore now a burden like a great battle song to excite and inspire, to remind her that she had been snatched as by a miracle from the commonplace.  And all this was a function of Ditmar.

Life had become portentous.  And she was troubled by no qualms of logic, but gloried, womanlike, in her lack of it.  She did not ask herself why she had deliberately enlarged upon Miss Ottway’s duties, invaded debatable ground in part inevitably personal, flung herself with such abandon into the enterprise of his life’s passion, at the same time maintaining a deceptive attitude of detachment, half deceiving herself that it was zeal for the work by which she was actuated.  In her soul she knew