Pafflow yielded first to force and later to the irresistible power of Mamise's humility. Indeed, her ardor for service warmed his indifferent soul at last, and he joined with her to make a brilliant team, hurtling the rivets in red arcs from the coke to the pail with the precision of a professional baseball battery. Mamise eventually acquired a womanly deftness in plucking up the rivet and setting it in place, and Davidge might have seen grounds for uneasiness in her eager submissiveness to Sutton as she knelt before him, watched his eye timidly, and glowed like coke under the least breath of his approval. CHAPTER III Sutton was a mighty man in his way, and earning a wage that would have been accounted princely a year before. All the workers were receiving immense increase of pay, but the champion riveters were lavishly rewarded. The whole shipyard industry was on a racing basis. Plans were being laid to celebrate the next Fourth of July with an unheard-of number of launchings. Every boat-building company was trying to put overboard an absolute maximum of hulls on that day. "Hurry-up" Hurley, who had driven the first rivets into a steel ship pneumatically, and Charles M. Schwab, of Bethlehem, were the inspiring leaders in the rush, and their ambition was to multiply the national output by ten. The spirit of emulation thrilled all the thrillable workmen, but the riveters were the spectacular favorites. Their names appeared in the papers as they topped each other's scores, and Sutton kept outdoing himself. For special occasions he groomed himself like a race-horse, resting the day before the great event and then giving himself up to a frenzy of speed. On one noble day of nine hours' fury he broke the world's record temporarily. He drove four thousand eight hundred and seventy-five three-quarter-inch rivets into place. Then he was carried away to a twenty-four-hour rest, like an exhausted prizefighter. That was one of the great days in Mamise's history, for she was permitted to assist in the achievement, and she was not entirely grateful to Davidge for suppressing the publication of her name alongside Sutton's. Her photograph appeared with his in many of the supplements, but nobody recognized the lily-like beauty of Miss Webling in the smutty-faced passer-boy crouching at Sutton's elbow. The publication of her photograph as an English belle had made history for her, in that it brought Jake Nuddle into her life; but this picture had no follow-up except in her own pride. This rapture, however, long postdated her first adventure into the shipyard. That grim period of eight hours was an alternation of shame, awkwardness, stupidity, failure, fatigue, and despair. She did not even wash up for lunch, but picked her fodder from her pail with her companions. She smoked a convivial cigarette with the gang and was proud as a boy among grown-ups. She even wanted to be tough and was tempted to use ugly words in a swaggering pride.