Gazing up at her fascinated, I noted how deep the little lines of kindliness were at the corners of her smiling gray eyes, and how, beyond the usual conventional coating of powder, no effort had been made to hide the fact that the beautiful face was not in its first youth. The consequent effect of honesty and good faith was ineffable, and had its perfect counterpart in the extraordinary simplicity and directness of her gentle manner. She drew her regal fur up around her long neck and her husband put his hat back on his thick white hair. "While you're about it, you'd better get those two plaque-making machines electrified," he remarked. "Any electrician could do it for you. There's no sense in having your operators push down that pedal for every letter they make. Man-power again! Europe!"
I realized that they were moving towards the door and shook myself out of my entranced silence. "But you can't buy a press of that kind in Paris!" I called after them, all the bitterness of my past struggles in my voice. "You can't buy anything in war-time France. There hasn't been a press or anything else manufactured in France for two years! Don't you know that all the factories are making munitions?"
Mr. Robert J. Hall—that was the name on the card—came back to me and said earnestly: "Money can't do everything, but I tell you that it can buy anything buyable if you've got enough of it. Now we'll give you money enough to buy that press. It's up to you to find it." From the doorway his wife smiled to mitigate his intense seriousness and said again, "It's the kind that opens and shuts its jaws, you know." The door swung shut behind them to a last call-to-arms, "Go to it!" from Mr. Hall.
Five minutes later a proof-reader coming found me still standing, staring at their card.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
I took her by the arm. "Look here," I said, "did I just show two visitors around the place?"
"Do you mean that awfully good-looking man with the white hair and the royal-princess-effect in sables and eyes like Trilby's?"
I nodded, reassured. I had not dreamed them!
Of course I went to it. Of course I found the press. After such a galvanic shock, I could have found, if that had been my need, a featherbed on the Arc de l'Étoile. I have too many other things to tell you about the Halls to describe the hunt after the press, although in its way that was epic, too. Enough to say that after three weeks of impassioned concentration on the subject during which I ate, drank, slept, and lived printing-press, it was located, a second-hand one in excellent condition, in a loft in the remotest corner of a remote industrial region of Paris. It was quite exactly what we needed, a thousand times better than anything we had dreamed of having. I felt almost a reverent admiration to see it opening and shutting its great jaw, and spewing out perfect raised-type pages, at least twelve times faster than our wretched hand press; doing in one day the work of two weeks!