“What do I like?” Red spoke slowly. “I can’t tell you that. I can only tell you what I have liked in the past.”
“Tell me.” She laid her hand on his arm.
“This,” he said slowly, as if recalling some scene in the remote past, “this is what I have liked: to stand before an open hearth in the steel mill where twenty tons of scrap-iron, together with limestone and tungsten, boil at white heat; to reach in a long ladle and sample it as the New England farmer samples his maple syrup; to watch the sample cool, to crack it with a hammer, to study its gleam; to do this again and again until at last you make a motion that says, ‘The batch is done.’
“Then to throw a lever and watch that white hot metal, twenty tons of it, pour into a massive brick-lined pot of steel that hangs suspended from a crane.
“Then—” He paused to take a long breath. The girl was staring at him with all her eyes. “Then to stand beneath that twenty tons of molten steel and make the gesture that sets flat cars in motion, flat cars loaded with forms to receive the steel. Then to watch the white hot steel pour once more; to follow its course until the forms have been lifted off and the billets of steel stand, red hot, sizzling in the snow, row on row.”
He looked at her as if uncertain whether or not to go on.
“Yes—yes. Please?” whispered Berley Todd.
“To climb a steel stairway—” He took a fresh start. “To seize a lever that swings a crane. To lift a red hot billet of steel into its place before heavy steel rollers, then to lift it and toss it, to turn it and bump it, to roll it here and roll it there, to press it and cut it, then slide it to one side, a long, perfect steel rail over which rich and poor, presidents and princes may ride in safety. That,” he ended, “has seemed to me a very large sample of life.”
“Oh!” she breathed. And again, “Oh!”
She said never a word. For all that, he sensed the fact that she had grasped the meaning of all this and was glad.