After all, she thought, she might as well give up the idea of parties. She couldn't give one herself; she knew Henry would refuse to leave his hateful engine even for one evening. She was very homesick for Greenfield. The months went by. Ford worked all day at the Edison plant, half the night in his own shop. The men he met in his work had taken to looking at him half in amusement, half in good-humored contempt. He was a "crank," they said. Some of the younger ones would laugh and tap their foreheads when he had gone past them. One night he came home and found Mrs. Ford crying. The neighbors were saying that he was crazy, she sobbed. She'd told Mrs. Lessing just exactly what she thought of her, too, and she'd never speak to her again! But, oh, wouldn't he ever get that horrid engine finished so they could live like other people? It all hurt. No man was ever friendlier, or enjoyed more the feeling of comradeship with other men than Ford. But it was a choice between that and his automobile. He went on with his routine of work, fourteen or sixteen hours of it every day, and he drew more into himself, became more reserved with every month that passed. If any man ever followed Emerson's doctrine of self-reliance, giving up friends and family in his devotion to his own work, that man was Henry Ford in those days. There was nothing dramatic about it--just an obscure machinist with an idea, willing to give up social pleasures, restful domestic evenings, the good opinion of his neighbors, and work hard in an old shed behind his common little house. Only an ordinary man turning his back on everything most of us want, for an "impractical" theory. That was all. He continued to work for two years. He built the engine slowly, thinking out every step in advance, drawing every casting before he made it, struggling for months over the problem of the electrical wiring and spark. Sometimes he worked all night. "Sick? No, I never was sick," he says. "It isn't overworking that breaks men down; it's overplaying and overeating. I never ate too much, and I felt all right, no matter how long I worked. Of course, sometimes I was pretty tired." One day he called his wife out to the shed. The little engine, set up on blocks, was humming away, its flywheel a blur in the air. The high-speed revolutions that made the automobile possible were an accomplished fact. "Oh, Henry! It's done! You've finished it!" she said happily. "No, that's just the beginning. Now I've got to figure out the transmission, the steering gear and a--a lot of things," he replied. CHAPTER XIV STRUGGLING WITH THE FIRST CAR