The understanding of Mamise's task was easier than its performance. Pafflow sent the rivets to her fast and fleet, and they were red-hot. The first one passed her and struck Sutton. His language blistered. The second sizzled against her hip. The third landed in the pail with a pleasant clink, but she was so slow in getting her tongs about it, and fitting it into its place, that it was too cold for use. This threw her into a state of hopelessness. She was ready to resign. "I think I'd better go back to crocheting," she sighed. Sutton gave her a playful shove that almost sent her off the platform: "Nah, you don't, Moll. You made me chase Snotty off the job, and you're goin' t'rough wit' it. You ain't doin' no worse 'n I done meself when I started rivetin'. Cheese! but I spoiled so much work I got me tail kicked offen me a dozen times!" This was politer language than some that he used. His conversation was interspersed with words that no one prints. They scorched Mamise's ears like red-hot rivets at first, but she learned to accept them as mere emphasis. And, after all, blunt Anglo-Saxon never did any harm that Latin paraphrase could prevent. The main thing was Sutton's rough kindliness, his splendid efficiency, and his infinite capacity for taking pains with each rivet-head, hammering it home, then taking up his pneumatic chipping-tool to trim it neat. That is the genius and the glory of the artisan, to perfect each detail _ad unguem_, like a poet truing up a sonnet. Sutton was putting in thousands on thousands of rivets a month, and every one of them was as important to him as every other. He feared the thin knife-blade of the rivet-tester as the scrupulous writer dreads the learned critic's scalpel. Mamise was dazed to learn that the ship named after her would need nearly half a million rivets, each one of them necessary to the craft's success. The thought of the toil, the noise, the sweat, the money involved made the work a sort of temple-building, and the thought of Nicky Easton's ability to annul all that devout accomplishment in an instant nauseated her like a blasphemy. She felt herself a priestess in a holy office and renewed her flagging spirits with prayers for strength and consecration. But few of the laborers had Sutton's pride or Mamise's piety in the work. Just as she began to get the knack of catching and placing the rivets Pafflow began to register his protest against her sex. He took a low joy in pitching rivets wild, and grinned at her dancing lunges after them. Mamise would not tattle, but she began again to lose heart. Sutton's restless appetite for rivets noted the new delay, and he grasped the cause of it at once. His first comment was to walk over to the furnace and smash Pafflow in the nose. "You try any of that I. W. W. sabotodge here, you----, and I'll stuff you in a rivet-hole and turn the gun loose on you."