Annie now looked at it with that irresolution of hers, and Lyra commanded: “Get right in. We'll go down to the Works. You've never met my husband yet; have you, Annie?”
“No, I haven't, Lyra. I've always just missed him somehow. He seems to have been perpetually just gone to town, or not got back.”
“Well, he's really at home now. And I don't mean at the house, which isn't home to him, but the Works. You've never seen the Works either, have you?”
“No, I haven't.”
“Well, then, we'll just go round there, and kill two birds with one stone. I ought to show off my new phaeton to Mr. Wilmington first of all; he gave it to me. It would be kind of conjugal, or filial, or something. You know Mr. Wilmington and I are not exactly contemporaries, Annie?”
“I heard he was somewhat your senior,” said Annie reluctantly.
Lyra laughed. “Well, I always say we were born in the same century, anyway.”
They came round into the region of the shops, and Lyra checked her pony in front of her husband's factory. It was not imposingly large, but, as Mrs. Wilmington caused Annie to observe, it was as big as the hat shops and as ugly as the shoe shops.
The structure trembled with the operation of its industry, and as they mounted the wooden steps to the open outside door, an inner door swung ajar for a moment, and let out a roar mingled of the hum and whirl and clash of machinery and fragments of voice, borne to them on a whiff of warm, greasy air. “Of course it doesn't smell very nice,” said Lyra.
She pushed open the door of the office, and finding its first apartment empty, led the way with Annie to the inner room, where her husband sat writing at a table.