“What color is Mother going to have?”
“Dark green. The chimney is to be made of reinforced concrete.”
“‘Reinforced’ must mean ‘strengthened,’ but how do you strengthen it?” inquired Margaret.
“You’ve seen how we build a mold to pour the concrete in; inside of the mold we build a sort of cage of steel rods. Don’t you see that when the concrete hardens it would be almost impossible for such a reinforced piece of work to break through?”
“Couldn’t an earthquake break it?”
“An earthquake might give a piece of solid concrete such a twist that it would crack through, but suppose the crack found itself up against a steel rod? Don’t you think it would complicate matters?”
The girls thought it would.
“I’m awfully glad our chimney is going to be reinforced,” Dorothy exclaimed, “because up on this knoll we’re going to feel the wind a lot and it would be horrid if the chimney should fall down!”
“It certainly would,” agreed the Ethels, but Mr. Anderson assured them that they need not be afraid of any accident of the sort with a reinforced concrete chimney.
“I’ve seen skyscrapers going up in New York,” said Margaret “and all the beams were of steel. Are you going to use steel beams here?”