"You're going to turn the world upside down, I suppose?"

"We've always done that more or less, and n.o.body ever could stop us, from the Garden of Eden on. In the future, one thing is sure: a lot of women will go wrong, as the saying is, under the new conditions, with liberty and their own money and all. But, good Lord! millions of women went wrong in the old days! The first books of the Bible tell about all the kinds of wickedness that we know to-day. Somebody complained that with all our modern science we hadn't invented one new deadly sin. We go on using the same old seven--well, indecencies. It will be the same with women. It's bound to be. You can't keep women unfree.

You've simply got to let them loose. The old ways were hideous; and it's dishonest and vicious to pretend that people used to be better than they were, just as an argument in favor of slavery, for fear they will be worse than the imaginary woman they put up for an argument. I fancy women were just about as good and just about as bad in old Turkey, in the jails they call harems, as they are in a three-ringed circus to-day.

"When the old-fashioned woman went wrong she lied or cried or committed suicide or took to the streets or went on with her social success, as the case might be. She'll go on doing much the same--just as men do. Some men repent, some cheat, some kill themselves; others go right along about their business, whether it's in a bank, a church, a factory, a city or a village or anywhere.

"But in the new marriage--for marriage is really changing, though the marrying people are the same old folks--in the new marriage a man must do what a woman has had to do all along: take the partner for better or worse and no questions asked."

He humored her heresy because he found it too insane to reason with.

"In other words, we'll take our women as is."

"That's the expression--_as is_. A man will take his sweetheart 'as is' or leave her. And whichever he does, as you always say, oh, she'll get along somehow."

"The old-fashioned home goes overboard, then?"

"That depends on what you mean by the old-fashioned home. I had one, and it could well be spared. There were all kinds of homes in old times and the Middle Ages and nowadays, and there'll be all kinds forever. But we're wrangling like a pair of lovers instead of getting along beautifully like a pair of casual acquaintances."

"Aren't we going to be more than that?"

"I hope not. I want a place on your pay-roll; I'm not asking for a job as your wife."

"You can have it."

"Thanks, but I have another engagement. When I have made my way in the world and can support you in the style you're accustomed to, I may come and ask for your hand."

Her flippancy irked him worse than her appalling ideas, but she grew more desirable as she grew more infuriating, for the love-game has some resemblances to the fascinating-sickening game of golf. She did not often argue abstrusely, and she was already f.a.gged out mentally.

She broke off the debate.

"Now let's think of something else, if you don't mind."

They talked of everything else, but his soul was chiefly engaged in alternating vows to give her up and vows to make her his own in spite of herself; and he kept on trying to guess the conundrum she posed him in refusing to enlighten him as to those unmentionable years between his first sight of her and his second.

In making love, as in other popular forms of fiction, the element of mystery is an invaluable adjunct to the property value. He was still pondering her and wondering what she was pondering when they reached the town where his shipyard lay.

CHAPTER II

From a hilltop Marie Louise saw below her in panorama an ugly mess of land and riverscape--a large steel shed, a bewilderment of scaffolding, then a far stretch of muddy flats spotted with flies that were probably human beings, among a litter of timber, of girders, of machine-shanties, of railroad tracks, all spread out along a dirty water.

A high wire fence surrounded what seemed to need no protection. In the neighborhood were numbers of workmen's huts--some finished, and long rows of them in building, as much alike and as graceful as a pan of raw biscuits.

She saw it all as it was, with a stranger's eyes. Davidge saw it with the eyes a father sees a son through, blind to evident faults, vividly accepting future possibilities as realities.

Davidge said, with repressed pride:

"Well, thar she blows!"

"What?"

"My shipyard!" This with depressed pride.

"Oh, rilly! So it is! How wonderful!" This with forced enthusiasm.

"You don't like it," he groaned.

"I'm crazy about it."

"If you could have seen it when it was only marsh and weeds and mud-holes and sluices you'd appreciate what we've reclaimed and the work that has been done."

The motor pitched down a badly bruised road.

"Where's the ship that's nearly done--your mother's ship?"

"Behind the shed, in among all that scaffolding."

"Don't tell me there's a ship in there!"

"Yep, and she's just bursting to come out."

They entered the yard, past a guardian who looked as if a bottle of beer would buy him, and a breath strong enough to blow off the froth would blow him over.

Within a great cage of falsework Marie Louise could see the ship that Davidge had dedicated to his mother. But he did not believe Marie Louise ready to understand it.

"Let's begin at the beginning," he said. "See those railroad tracks over there? Well, that's where the timber comes from the forests and the steel from the mills. Now we'll see what happens to 'em in the shop."

He took her into the shed and showed her the traveling-cranes that could pick up a locomotive between their long fingers and carry it across the long room like a captured beetle.

"Up-stairs is the mold-loft. It's our dressmaking-shop. We lay down the design on the floor, and mark out every piece of the ship in exact size, and then make templates of wood to match--those are the patterns. It's something like making a gown, I suppose."

"I see," said Marie Louise. "Then you fit the dress together out in the yard."

"Exactly," said Davidge. "You've mastered the whole thing already.

It's a long climb up there. Will you try it?"

"Later, perhaps. I want to see these delightful what-you-may-call-'ems first."

She watched the men at work, each group about its own machine, like priests at their various altars. Davidge explained to her the cruncher that manicured thick plates of steel sheets as if they were finger-nails, or beveled their edges; the puncher that needled rivet-holes through them as if they were silk, the ingenious Lysholm tables with rollers for tops.

Marie Louise was like a child in a wholesale toy-shop, understanding nothing, ecstatic over everything, forbidden to touch anything. In her ignorance of technical matters, the simplest device was miraculous.

The whole place was a vast laboratory of mysteries and magic.

There was a something hallowed and awesome about it all. It had a cathedral grandeur, even though it was a temple builded with hands for the sake of the things builded with hands. The robes of the votaries were grimy and greasy, and the prayer they poured out was sweat. They chewed tobacco and spat regardless. They eyed her as curiously as she them. They swaggered each his own way, one by extra obliviousness, another with a flourish of gesture. They seemed to want to speak, and so did she, but embarra.s.sment caused a common silence.

On the ground they had cleared and under the roof they had established they had fashioned vessels that should carry not myrrh and nard to make a sweet smell or to end in a delicate smoke, but wheat, milk and coal, clothes and shoes and sh.e.l.ls, for the feeding and warming of people in need, and for the destruction of the G.o.d of destruction.