As a result of the conference, the owners, although professing scepticism, consented to give him a small room in which to perfect his invention and, in their generosity, even guaranteed to continue the payment of his former meagre salary. From that day, Emil began to live a particular and intensely nervous life. He was now one of a large army, consisting of press men, lithographers, zinc men, clerks, artists, stenographers, bookkeepers. The majority of these men did their work methodically and as a matter of duty. When they quitted the factory at night, they forgot the labour that had occupied them during the day. With Emil, however, it was otherwise. In a tiny room, reeking with heat and dust and clamorous with the rumble of the presses, he worked, scarcely taking note of the passing of one day and the birth of another. Often he sought the factory at night. The general manager, a man with a forceful presence and a shrewd eye, scornfully shrugged his shoulders. He distrusted such enthusiasm; but the owners were more hopeful. At night they had a door left open for the erratic inventor. Unconscious that he was observed, Emil hurried through the streets and bounded up the steps to his den. Then how he caressed his invention, how he stared straight before him with eyes that saw nothing, while his brain drew from the surrounding ether a crowd of images wonderful for their reality and vigour. Sometimes in these nights of limpid contemplation, he became as beautiful as an angel. At other times, inspiration was capricious and the particular idea that he sought must be pursued. At such times he would crack his fingers at the joints, wave backward and forward like a tree in a storm, rock like a ship on an angry sea. Somehow, he would wrest his idea from the vast Unknown. And when he had succeeded in fixing it, smiling peacefully, he would go to sleep like a child; go to sleep and dream of some far land where invention was not torture. Before his work-bench, exhausted, he was often discovered in the early dawn by Ding Dong when he came to sweep out. Half-witted, deaf and dumb, with a face so hideous that caricature could not exaggerate it, Ding Dong had received his nick-name from some bookish artist or other. With a fat tongue useless in his wide mouth and ears like sails, though they served to convey no sound to his meagre brain, Ding Dong ate habitually of the food thrown away by saloons, drank the dregs left in whiskey glasses, and, with the agility of a little cat, accepted the stumps of cigarettes which the clerks good naturedly threw him. Between him and Emil, existed a peculiar friendship, and many were the novel breakfast parties held in the little workroom at the hour when New York was just waking to life.