"It's wonderful," he said. "You can do it. I'm trying to get at the reason. You don't over-emphasize. And yet your voice is so flexible that you aren't monotonous. And you don't plunge at every sentence, and come down hard on the first word, and taper off to nothing. If it keeps up, this is going to make me a terrible grafter, because I can't begin to pay you for what this will be worth to me." "I'll stay as long as I can stand it!" I told him, trying to keep the happiness out of my eyes and my voice at the same time. In a little while, the joyous sensation of what I was doing gave way to the interest in the reading itself. His book, I found, was a serious study of work in its relation to human growth. From the Hebraic conception of work as a curse to the present-day conception of work as conscious cooperation in creation, in evolution, he was coming down the line, visiting all nations, entering all industries. It was curious that, in those first days there never once passed between us any word of the great human problems in which we were both so excludingly interested. I understood that doubtless he had accustomed himself to saying very little about them, save when he knew that he would meet understanding. I had been at work for him more than a month before we ever talked at all, save the casual give-and-take of the day, and in occasional interludes, like the interludes of herrings and tea. One morning we were copying some Chinese reports giving the total wages earned by men in seventy-year periods, and some totals to indicate their standards of living. Suddenly he said: "Considering our civilization, and our culture and enlightenment-business, our own figures, proportionately to what we might make them with our resources, are blacker than the ex-empire's." "You can't tell it in totals, though," I said. "You can't indicate in figures what is lost by low wages, any more than you can measure great works of genius by efficiency charts." "You care about these things?" he asked. "More than anything else," I answered. After that, he talked to me sometimes about his work. "I wish," he said once, "that I knew more about the working women. I'd like to get some of this off before a group of working women, and see how they'd take it." "I could plan that for you," I said, "if you really mean it." He looked at me curiously. "You are a remarkable little person," he observed. "Are there, then, things that you can't do?" I went to see Rose back in the same factory, a little more worn, a little less hopeful, but still at her work among the girls. She welcomed the suggestion that he come to speak. He came for the next week's meeting. "Rose," I said, "don't say anything to Mr. Ember about me." Before that night came round, something happened. One morning, when Mr. Ember was going through his mail, he read one letter through twice. "This one," he said, "I must take time to answer. My lecture bureau has gone into bankruptcy."