"The whole art is in a confusion. There is going to be a ghastly lot of mistakes and waste and scandal, but if we win out there'll be such a cloudburst that the Germans will think it's raining ships. Niagara Falls will be nothing to the cascade of iron hulls going overboard. Von Tirpitz with his ruthless policy will be like the old woman who tried to sweep the tide back with a broom." He grew so fervent in his vision of the new creation that he hardly saw the riders as they stormed the hurdles. Marie Louise took fire from his glow and forgot the petty motive that had impelled her to bring him to this place. Suddenly he realized how shamelessly eloquent he had been, and subsided with a slump. "What a bore I am to tell all this to a woman!" She rose at that. "The day has passed when a man can apologize for talking business to a woman. I've been in England for years, you know, and the women over there are doing all the men's work and getting better wages at it than the men ever did. After the war they'll never go back to their tatting and prattle. I'm going to your shipyard and have a look-in, but not the way a pink debutante follows a naval officer over a battle-ship, staring at him and not at the works. I'm going on business, and if I like ship-building, I may take it up." "Great!" he laughed, and slapped her hand where it lay on the wheel. He apologized again for his roughness. "I'll forgive anything except an apology," she said. As she looked proudly down at the hand he had honored with a blow as with an accolade she saw by her watch that it was after six. "Great Heavens! it's six and more!" she cried. "Lady Clifton-Wyatt will never forgive you--or me. I'll take you to her at once." "Never mind Lady Clifton-Wyatt," he said. "But I've got another engagement for dinner--with a man, at half past six. I wish I hadn't." They were drifting with the twilight into an elegiac mood, suffering the sweet sorrow of parting. The gloaming steeped the dense woods, and the romance of sunset and gathering night saddened the business man's soul, but wakened a new and unsuspected woman in Marie Louise. Her fierce imaginations were suddenly concerned with conquests of ambition, not of love. So fresh a realm was opened to her that she was herself renewed and restored to that boyish-girlish estate of young womanhood before love has educated it to desire and the slaveries of desire. The Aphrodite that lurks in every woman had been put to flight by the Diana that is also there. Davidge on the other hand had warmed toward Marie Louise suddenly, as he saw how ardent she could be. He had known her till now only in her dejected and terrified, distracted humors. Now he saw her on fire, and love began to blaze within him.