The department had its own laboratories, its own chemists, its own engineers.  Everything was tested.  Two articles might appear to the layman equal in virtue; careful examination by experts might not disclose a difference between them, but the skill of the chemist would show that this article was a tenth of one per cent, less guilty of alloy than that, or that the breaking strength of this was a minute fraction greater than that. ...  So decisions were reached.

Bonbright was to learn that price did not always rule.  He saw orders given for carloads of certain supplies which tested but a point or two higher than its rival—­and sold for dollars more a ton.  Thousands of dollars were paid cheerfully for those few points of excellence. ...  Here was business functioning as he did not know business could function.  Here business was an art, and he applied himself to it like an artist.  Here he could lay aside that growing discontent, that dissatisfaction, that was growing upon him.  Here, in the excitement of distinguishing the better from the worse, he could forget Ruth and the increasingly impracticable condition of his relations with her.

He had come to a realization that his game of make-believe would not march.  He realized that Ruth either was his wife or she was not. ...  But he did not know what to do about it.  It seemed a problem without a solution, and it was—­for him.  Its solution did not lie in himself, but in his wife.  Bonbright could not set the thing right; his potentiality lay only for its destruction.  Three courses lay open to him; to assert his husbandship; to send Ruth home to her mother; or to put off till to-morrow and to-morrow and still another to-morrow.  Only in the last did hope reside, and he clung to hope. ...

He tried to conceal his unrest, his discontent, his rebellion against the thing that was, from Ruth.  He continued to be patient, gentle. ...  He did not know how she wept and accused herself because of that gentleness and patience.  He did not know how she tried to compel love by impact of will—­and how she failed.  But he did come to doubt her love.  He could not do otherwise.  Then he wondered why she had married him, and, reviewing the facts of his hurried marriage, he wondered the more with bitterness and heartache.  Against his will his affairs were traveling toward a climax.  The approaching footsteps of the day when something must happen were audible on the path.

The day after his installation in the purchasing department he lunched at the little hash house across the street.  Sitting on his high stool, he tried to imagine he was a part of that sweating, gulping crowd of men, that he was one of them, and not an outsider, suspected, regarded with unfriendly looks.

Behind him a man began to make conversation for Bonbright’s ears.  It had happened before.

“The strike up to the Foote plant’s on its last legs,” said the man, loudly.