“That would be glorious. I should like to know something about ships.”
“I can teach you all I know in a little while.”
“You know all there is to know, don’t you?”
“Lord help us, I should say not! I knew a little about the old methods, but they’re all done away with. The fabricated ship is an absolute novelty. The old lines are gone, and the old methods. What few ship-builders we had are trying to forget what they know. Everybody is green. We had to find out for ourselves and pass it along to the foremen, and they hand it out to the laborers.
“The whole art is in a confusion. There is going to be a ghastly lot of mistakes and waste and scandal, but if we win 144 out there’ll be such a cloudburst that the Germans will think it’s raining ships. Niagara Falls will be nothing to the cascade of iron hulls going overboard. Von Tirpitz with his ruthless policy will be like the old woman who tried to sweep the tide back with a broom.”
He grew so fervent in his vision of the new creation that he hardly saw the riders as they stormed the hurdles. Marie Louise took fire from his glow and forgot the petty motive that had impelled her to bring him to this place. Suddenly he realized how shamelessly eloquent he had been, and subsided with a slump.
“What a bore I am to tell all this to a woman!”
She rose at that. “The day has passed when a man can apologize for talking business to a woman. I’ve been in England for years, you know, and the women over there are doing all the men’s work and getting better wages at it than the men ever did. After the war they’ll never go back to their tatting and prattle. I’m going to your shipyard and have a look-in, but not the way a pink debutante follows a naval officer over a battle-ship, staring at him and not at the works. I’m going on business, and if I like ship-building, I may take it up.”
“Great!” he laughed, and slapped her hand where it lay on the wheel. He apologized again for his roughness.
“I’ll forgive anything except an apology,” she said.