Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/474

Rh way to do their marketing,” she said laughing, as she and Amherst emerged once more into the street. “It’s the same kind of interest I used to feel in my dolls and guinea pigs—a managing, interfering old maid’s interest. I don’t believe I should care a straw for them if I couldn’t dose them and order them about.”

Amherst laughed too: he recalled the time when he had dreamed that just such warm personal sympathy was her sex’s destined contribution to the broad work of human beneﬁcence. Well, it had not been a dream: here was a woman whose deeds spoke for her. And suddenly the thought came to him: what might they not do at Westmore together! The brightness of it was blinding—like the dazzle of sunlight which faced them as they walked toward the mills. But it left him speechless, confused—glad to have a pretext for routing Duplain out of the ofﬁce, introducing him to Miss Brent, and asking him for the keys of the buildings.…

It was wonderful, again, how she grasped what he was doing in the mills, and saw how his whole scheme hung together, harmonizing the work and leisure of the operatives, instead of treating them as half machine, half man, and neglecting the man for the machine. Nor was she content with Utopian generalities: she wanted to know the how and why of each case, to hear what conclusions he drew from his results, to what solutions his experiments pointed. [ 458 ]