There were several other gentlemen in the room,--waiting, apparently, for something,--reading the morning papers, playing with the Newfoundland dog that had curled himself up in the patch of sunshine by the window, or chatting with Miss Defourchet. None of them, she saw, were men of cultured leisure: one or two millionnaires, burly, stubby-nosed fellows, with practised eyes and Port-hinting faces: the class of men whose money was made thirty years back, who wear slouched clothes, and wield the coarser power in the States. They came out to the talk fit for a lady, on the open general field, in a lumbering, soggy way, the bank-note smell on every thought. The others, more unused to society, caught its habit better, she thought, belonging as they did to a higher order: they were practical mechanicians, and their profession called, she knew, for tolerably powerful and facile faculties of brain. The young lady, who was waiting too, though not so patiently as the others, amused herself in drawing them out and foiling them against each other, with a good deal of youthful tact, and want of charity, for a while. She grew tired at last. "They are long coming, uncle," she said, rising from her chair. "They are here, Mary: putting up the model in the back lobby for the last hour. Did you think it would be brought in here?" "I don't know. Mr. Aikens is not here,"--glancing at the timepiece uneasily. "He's always slow," said one of the machinists, patting the dog's head. "But I will rely more on his judgment of the engine than on my own. He'll not risk a dollar on it, either, if there's a chance of its proving a failure." "It cannot be a failure," she said, impatiently, her peremptory brown eyes lighting. "It has been tried before," said her uncle, cautiously,--"or the same basis of experiment,--substitution of compressed air for steam,--and it did not succeed. But it is the man you reason from, Mary, not the machine." "I don't understand anything about the machine," in a lower voice, addressing the man she knew to possess most influence in the party. "But this Starke has given his life to it, and a life worth living, too. All the strength of soul and body that God gave him has gone into that model out yonder. He has been dragging it from place to place for years, half starving, to get it a chance of trial"-- "All which says nothing for the wheels and pulleys," dryly interrupted the man, with a critical look at her flushing and paling face. People of standfast habit were always shy of this young person, because, having an acute brain and generous impulses, and being a New-Englander by birth, she had believed herself called to be a reformer, and had lectured in public last winter. Her lightest remarks had, somehow, an oratorical twang. The man might have seen what a true, grand face hers would be, when time had taken off the acrid, aggressive heat which the, to her, novel wrongs in the world provoked in it.