Dalton caught at the paper and looked it over with careful scrutiny, his face lighting as he gazed.
"Really!" he said at length, glancing up to give her an approving nod, "really, this isn't bad—that is, I mean you have made a good bargain, for all I can see, and given us the opportunity to work up a new line that may prove lucrative. I wouldn't have thought it of a girl—a young lady like you."
She laughed amusedly.
"I'm glad I have been able to please you at last, Mr. Dalton! The electricians will begin wiring the town in a few days. They will put in a cheap style of 'phone, as it is not looks we are after but convenience, and will hurry the work right through." She stopped with some hesitation of manner, but looked as if more was to come, and her manager gave her a respectful, questioning glance.
"There's another thing," she said presently in a rather faint voice, "the central office is also to be an exchange."
"A—what?"
"An exchange. You see, that's really my main reason for having the 'phones. I want my people to learn what the one right principle of exchange is. We talk about money being the medium of exchange, and as such it is thought to be the best thing on earth. Yet the greed of it is the root of all evil. I want to come back to first principles a little, and exchange from man to man, without this pernicious medium that has filled us with covetousness and a lack of consideration for others. I want to see if people are really so callous and cold to each other as they seem, or if this unreadiness to help is only because we are too greatly separated by the many mediums interposed—which prove barriers instead of channels. I want to find if every need cannot somehow, somewhere, meet its fulfilment, unless death itself has shut out the way. It is too limited a field, here, to learn absolutely, but it may give us some idea, and then——"
Mr. Dalton had settled back into his chair with a non-committal expression, and was drumming on the desk before him.
"I'm afraid," he murmured in a concise tone, "that you are talking above my head."
Joyce, rudely aroused from her introspective vision, looked at him rather blankly a moment, then sprang to her feet. At first she seemed offended, then cried briskly, with a mischievous air,