"Well, come down and learn the business first--you'd be nearer me." She sidestepped this sentimental jab and countered with a practical left hook: "But you'd teach me ship-building?" "I'd rather teach you home-building." "If you mean a home on the bounding main, I'll get right to work." He was stubborn about beginning with office tasks, and he took her to the mold-loft. She was fascinated but appalled by her own ignorance of what had come to be the most important of all knowledge. She sighed. "I've always been such a smatterer. I never have really known anything about anything. Most women are so astonishingly ignorant and indifferent about the essentials of men's life." She secretly resolved that she would study some of the basic principles of male existence--bookkeeping, drafting, letter-writing, filing, trading. It amused her as a kind of new mischief to take a course of business instruction on the sly and report for duty not as an ignoramus, but as a past-mistress in office practice. It was at least a refreshing novelty in duplicity. She giggled a little at the quaintness of her conspiracy. The old song, "Trust Her Not--She Is Fooling Thee," occurred to her in a fantastic parody: "Trust her not--she is fooling thee; she is clandestine at the business college; she is leading a double-entry life. She writes you in longhand, but she is studying shorthand. She is getting to be very fast--on the typewriter." Davidge asked her why she snickered, but she would not divulge her plot. She was impatient to spring it. She wondered if in a week she could learn all she had to learn--if she worked hard. It would be rather pleasant to sit at his desk-leaf and take dictation from him--confidential letters that he would intrust to no one else, letters written in a whisper and full of dark references. She hoped she could learn stenographic velocity in a few days. As she and Davidge walked back to the car she noted the workmen's shanties. "If I come here, may I live in one of those cunning new bungalettes?" "Indeed not! There are some nice houses in town." "I'm sick of nice houses. I want to rough it. In the next war millions of women will live in tents the way the men do. Those shanties would be considered palaces in Belgium and northern France. In fact, any number of women are over there now building huts for the poor souls." Davidge grew more and more wretched. He could not understand such a twisted courtship. His sweetheart did not want jewels and luxuries and a life of wealthy ease. Her only interest in him seemed to be that he would let her live in a shanty, wear overalls, and pound steel all day for union wages. CHAPTER III