“Linnet Morgan. He’s anxious to find handy lodgings.”
“Linnet Morgan. That’s the chap newly in charge of the scents? Would he live with just working-people like us?”
“What’s the difference?”
Nan could not define it. She had not intended a challenge, but Silas had a trick of treating everything as a challenge.
“He’s soft,” she said at last.
“He’ll learn not to be soft here.”
Towards the end of the supper, Silas fell into one of his silences that were little less alarming than his speech. He sat over the range, chewing his pipe. Nan, having cleared away the supper, made herself small with some sewing in a corner. Gregory, looming hugely about the low room, disposed his drawings on the table under the direct light of the hanging lamp. They were on oiled paper, pale blue, pale pink, and white; large sheets of exact drawings of exquisitely intricate machinery. He bent over them, handling pencils, rulers, small compasses, and other neat instruments of his craft with a certain and delicate touch. He had clamped the drawings to the table with drawing pins, holding down the curling corners, smoothing out the shine of the folds. He was lost at once in them, forgetting both his own observant mockery and the tragedy which had seized and shaken his relations in its rough grasp. He was lost in his silent world of smooth-sliding precision and perfection.
His drawing was his hobby, not his profession; he guarded it from the outside world as a secret, and in the factory perversely clung to the meanest and most strenuous physical labour. When his wife protested—with more politeness than indignation—his fingers ran in emphatic oaths. When his machines were ripe to be shown, he would lay them before the whole board of directors; yes, he would startle those gentlemen; but until then he would be a workman, wheeling the barrels of liquid soap to the vats, beating and stirring it in the vats when it needed cooling,—nothing more.
He worked under the light of the lamp, making here a dot of correction, there a measurement of infinitesimal exactitude. His great fingers touched as delicately as those of a painter of miniatures.
The kitchen clock ticked in the stillness.