He had his work so organized that it went on in his absence as if he were there. He insisted that the executives of the departments should follow the same rule. If they were struck down in battle their places were automatically supplied as in the regular army. So when Davidge went to the hospital the office machine went on as if he had gone to lunch. Mamise called on him oftener than he had called on her. She left the hospital in a few days after the explosion, but she did not step into his office and run the corporation for him as a well-regulated heroine of recent fiction would have done. She did not feel that she knew enough. And she did not know enough. She kept to her job with the riveting-gang and expected to be discharged any day for lack of pull with the new boss. But while she lasted she was one of the gang, and proud of it. She was neither masculine nor feminine, but human. As Vance Thompson has said, the lioness is a lion all but a little of the time, and so Mamise put off sexlessness with her overalls and put it on with her petticoats. She put off the coarseness at the same time as she scrubbed away the grime. The shipyard was still a realm of faery to her. It was an unending experience of miracles, commonplace to the men, but wonder-work to her. She had not known what "pneumatic" or "hydraulic" really meant. The acetylene flame-knife, the incomprehensible ability of levers to give out so much more power than was put in them, dazed her. Nothing in the Grimms' stories could parallel the benevolent ogres of air and water and their dumfounding transformations. She learned that machinery can be as beautiful as any other human structure. Fools and art-snobs had said that machinery is ugly, and some of it is indeed nearly as ugly as some canvases, verses, and cathedrals. Other small-pates chattered of how the divine works of nature shamed the crudities of man. They spoke of the messages of the mountains, the sublimities of sunsets, and the lessons taught by the flowerets. These things are impressive, but it ought to be possible to give them praise without slandering man's creations, for a God that could make a man that could make a work of art would have to be a better God than one who could merely make a work of art himself. But machinery has its messages, too. It enables the little cave-dweller to pulverize the mountain; to ship it to Mohammed in Medina; to pick it up and shoot it at his enemies. Mamise, at any rate, was so enraptured by the fine art of machinery that when she saw a traveling-crane pick up a mass of steel and go down the track with it to its place, she thought that no poplar-tree was ever so graceful. And the rusty hulls of the new ships showing the sky through the steel lace of their rivetless sides were fairer than the sky.