“Yes, she seemed nice enough; she’s pretty—a little stupid, perhaps.”
“Oh, poor Dosia!” said Lois, “stupid! I should think she might have been, after all she had gone through. But then, you’re so used to my cleverness!” She looked up at him with provocative eyes, into which he smiled faintly, in recognition of what was expected of him; then he said, with a sudden appealing change of tone, “I’m very tired, Lois.”
She kissed him good night tenderly, with magnanimous concession to his unresponsiveness; there was no room for her in his thoughts to-night, and she had been so longing to see him! But she would tell him all about it to-morrow.
Justin laid his head upon the pillow, but his eyes burned into the darkness; there was a proud and bitter disappointment at his heart, even while reason adjusted his losses to their proper place. Before him in disagreeable force came the face of Leverich, and it was not the face of a man to whom one would care to make excuse or from whom one would challenge reproof; he could see the heavy jowl, the piercing eyes, the half-pompous, half-shrewd expression of one who respected nothing but success. This tangle up of the machinery, unusual and costly in its parts and appointments—Heaven only knew what far-reaching complications the delay of its repair might occasion! Justin had seen only too well in others how a false step at the first may count.
Whether or not Dosia and the typometer were united in their destinies, they had at least one thing in common—they were both embarked upon perilous ways.
CHAPTER SIX
Joseph Leverich, however, proved unexpectedly kind and sympathetic when Justin approached him on the latter’s return from the West. Justin had written to him, and then had been incidentally reënforced by the assistance of Mr. Angevin L. Cater. Bullen, the foreman, was versed in practical knowledge of the machinery, and how to go to work about repairs; different portions had to be sent for to all parts of the country. Justin pored over catalogues, and checked off and figured, and tried to find ready-made substitutes wherever he could for those they ordinarily manufactured for the typometer. Here Cater, who had worked up gradually into the manufacturing of his own machine, was of great use.
“You never can find anything just as you want it,” he conceded, encouragingly, to Justin, “but you can whittle off here and there, and make it do. I had to get along that way at first. You can manage pretty well, only there isn’t any real certainty to it. I got sort of weary”—he pronounced it “weery”—“of sending for steel bars to fit, and then getting a consignment of ’em just two sizes too large, with a polite note saying that they were out of what I wanted, but thought it was best, at any rate, to send me what they had. You don’t want to buck up against that kind of thing too often—not for your own good. So I started up the machinery, and even that goes back on you sometimes.”
“Mine has,” said Justin grimly.
“Oh, I don’t mean that way—it’s in the way it turns out the stuff. You get so cussed mi-nute nothing seems quite right to you. You get kinder soured even on the material in the rough; the grain is wrong in this, and that hasn’t been worked sufficient, and that t’other weighs too light.”