He went on, rubbing his hand back and forth over his gray hair: "But all that is only my guess at it. What's my guess worth? Nothing. But it's all I've got to go by, and so I do go by it. I don't know anything about anything but hats, and I can't but just make a guess at them."
He folded his hands before him and sighed. "There is a lot too much in hats for any one man to understand."
A HONEYMOON ... VIVE L'AMERIQUE!
I never knew many of the mere facts of their existence; where all their money came from, nor the extraordinary romance which must have lain back of them. Nor did I care to. They were too epic a pair for realism to touch. I find on thinking them over that I never quite came to believe in their actual existence; and yet, whatever value this slight sketch of them may have will be due to its literal truthfulness to fact.
My first sight of them was on a very cold day in the second year of the war when they suddenly filled with their resplendent presence the dreary room which was known as my "office." For several difficult months, against all the obstacles which made up everyday life in war-time France, I had been laboring to organize and get into shape a Braille printing establishment which would provide books for those most tragic of war-victims, the blind. Together with a crew of devoted volunteers I had tugged at the task, struggling like everybody else in France with a universal shortage of supplies, which began with able-bodied men and ran down to tacks and cheesecloth. There was also the difficulty of getting the "Authorization from the Government" before drawing your breath; but unless you have experienced this potent brake on enterprise, there is no use trying to describe it to you.
And yet, somehow, we had managed to get along, had added to our two plaque-making machines a couple of presses (very poor, both of them), had scrambled together a home-made device for wetting and drying the paper, had hunted down enough men to run the machines, had trained enough proof-readers and assembled enough voluntary editors, so that after a fashion we were really printing. The magazine, liberally bedewed with our blood and sweat, came out once a month; and although the two presses broke down with great frequency, we managed, by dint of incessant repairing, to keep at least one in shape to do tolerable work. We really had something patched-up, ungainly, but reasonably valid to show the sightseers who came through on the weekly visiting day, when all the rest of the institution was open to visitors.
I took my two Olympian guests for the usual idle, visiting-day couple. I went the rounds with them, pointing out with a weary satisfaction our various makeshifts. When I found that they listened receptively, I indulged in considerable self-pity over our difficulties, past and present. On their part they asked a good many pointed questions about the business end of our enterprise, about the financial status of the institution, about the probability of permanence for the venture. They came back to the "office" with me, the goddess in sables taking the solitary chair, while her mate sat down on the edge of my little table, stretching out before him legs clad in cloth of a fineness I had forgotten could exist. Quite casually, like the diamonds and pearls of the fairy-tales, amazing words now issued from their lips. "See here," said he of the broadcloth overcoat, "this is no way to do business. You can't get good work done with any such junk as those two presses! Why, I wouldn't take them as a gift, not for old iron! And turned by hand-power! Isn't that Europe for you? Why, for twenty-five cents a day of electric current, you could do ten times the work you are doing now, and have women run the presses! Go find a modern electric press that a man can look at and not think he's Benjamin Franklin come to life again, and let us know how much it costs."
He handed me his card as he spoke.
The goddess quitted my rickety, cane-bottomed chair and from her superb height dropped down on me, "You know, the kind that opens and shuts its jaws like a whale; perhaps you've seen them in printing establishments at home." She tempered her assumption of my ignorance by a smile out of the loveliest eyes imaginable and added: "My father was a printer out West. I used to play 'round in his shop. That's how I happen to know."