This loyalty pleased Janet, it had the strange effect of reviving loyalty in her.  She liked this evidence of Dick Caldwell’s confidence.  He was a self-contained and industrious young man, with crisp curly hair, cordial and friendly yet never intimate with the other employer; liked by them—­but it was tacitly understood his footing differed from theirs.  He was a cousin of the Chipperings, and destined for rapid promotion.  He went away every Saturday, it was known that he spent Sundays and holidays in delightful places, to return reddened and tanned; and though he never spoke about these excursions, and put on no airs of superiority, there was that in his manner and even in the cut of his well-worn suits proclaiming him as belonging to a sphere not theirs, to a category of fortunate beings whose stumbles are not fatal, who are sustained from above.  Even Ditmar was not of these.

“I’ve just been showing a lot of highbrows through the mill,” he told Janet.  “They asked questions enough to swamp a professor of economics.”

And Janet was suddenly impelled to ask:—­“Will you take me through sometime, Mr. Caldwell?”

“You’ve never been through?” he exclaimed.  “Why, we’ll go now, if you can spare the time.”

Her face had become scarlet.

“Don’t tell Mr. Ditmar,” she begged.  “You see—­he wanted to take me himself.”

“Not a word,” Caldwell promised as they left the office together and went downstairs to the strong iron doors that led to the Cotton Department.  The showing through of occasional visitors had grown rather tiresome; but now his curiosity and interest were aroused, he was conscious of a keen stimulation when he glanced at Janet’s face.  Its illumination perplexed him.  The effect was that of a picture obscurely hung and hitherto scarcely noticed on which the light had suddenly been turned.  It glowed with a strange and disturbing radiance....

As for Janet, she was as one brought suddenly to the realization of a miracle in whose presence she had lived for many years and never before suspected; the miracle of machinery, of the triumph of man over nature.  In the brief space of an hour she beheld the dirty bales flung off the freight cars on the sidings transformed into delicate fabrics wound from the looms; cotton that only last summer, perhaps, while she sat typewriting at her window, had been growing in the fields of the South.  She had seen it torn by the bale-breakers, blown into the openers, loosened, cleansed, and dried; taken up by the lappers, pressed into batting, and passed on to the carding machines, to emerge like a wisp of white smoke in a sliver and coil automatically in a can.  Once more it was flattened into a lap, given to a comber that felt out its fibres, removing with superhuman precision those for the finer fabric too short, thrusting it forth again in another filmy sliver ready for the drawing frames.  Six of these gossamer ropes were taken up, and again six.  Then came the Blubbers and the roving frames, twisting and winding, the while maintaining the most delicate of tensions lest the rope break, running the strands together into a thread constantly growing stronger and finer, until it was ready for spinning.