“I, ah—” began Kingsley—“Er—well, I never heard of a beginner starting on a drawing-in machine.”
“I have instructed Maggie to teach her,” said Travis shortly. Then he beckoned to Helen: “Come.”
She followed Richard Travis through the mill. He watched her as she stepped in among the common herd of people—the way at first in which she threw up her head in splendid scorn. Never had he seen her so beautiful. Never had he desired to own her so much as then.
“The exquisite, grand thing,” he muttered. “And I shall—she shall be mine.”
Then her head sank again with a little crushed smile of helpless pity and resignation. It touched even Travis, and he said, consolingly, to her:
“You are too beautiful to have to do this and you shall not—for long. You were born to be queen of—well, The Gaffs, eh?”
He laughed and then he touched boldly her hair which lay splendidly around her temples.
She looked at him resignedly, then she flushed to her eyes and followed him.
The drawer-in is to the loom what the architect is to the building. And more—it is both architect and foundation, for as the threads are drawn in so must the cloth be.
The work is tedious and requires skill, patience, quickness, and that nicety of judgment which comes with intellect of a higher order than is commonly found in the mill. For that reason the drawer-in is removed from the noise of the main room—she sits with another drawer-in in a quiet, little room nearby, and, with her trained fingers, she draws in through the eyelets the threads, which set the warp.