Milly promised. She would have promised “to go seventy miles up the Amazon River, turn to the right and stay there the rest of her life” if Nathan had desired it. So far as her small, commonplace soul was capable, she worshiped the young foreman as the Greeks once worshiped Apollo. Her feminine intuition grasped the difficulties Nathan encountered with his father’s twopenny policies. She sympathized with him. Because it had been Nathan’s business and Nathan’s father, she had remained in her place during the “strike.” Once when the boy had been compelled to work supperless until midnight, installing a new motor, she had plodded uptown in a storm of sleet and bought him a basket of lunch. The boy was not insensible to these indications of interest. He felt rather buoyant about them. He was something in the nature of a lady-killer. But to “let himself go” down into the slough of such a liaison, he could not. Milly was “factory help.” Owner’s sons didn’t do such things. She was preposterously out of caste. Yet he enjoyed the sensation of being the object of an unrequited affection. It flattered his vanity. Without appearing to do so, he threw favors in Milly’s way. Once when she injured her hand on a jagged box nail, he applied first aid, and second aid and third aid and fourth. He contended such dressings were merely saving the business from the expense of doctor’s fees. He was thus forestalling a suit for damages from Milly. It was a matter of business acumen, pure and simple. Once when Old Jake had been abusively intoxicated and taken her weekly pay envelope cruelly in the street, Nat had called her back and presented her with a second envelope, from his own money. It made him feel rather heroic to do this. Further than these small experiments in fire-playing, there was nothing between them. Of course not. There could never be anything between them. Yet there were times when the two found themselves alone together in the printing room, especially in the summer time when Milly’s collar disclosed a generous V of soft chest as white as milk, that the boy’s fancies ran riot. They carried him away, back to Foxboro Center days when he and I had first come in contact with the mystery surrounding sex, especially The Sex. She was only a factory girl. Of course. And yet, well, she had shown in a hundred crass ways that she loved him. She would love him more if he would allow it. All in all, it was not unpleasant. Yet the situation was not without its pathos. Milly could not help being one of Old Jake’s offspring. Meanwhile, of course, he was in love with Carol, very much in love with Carol. III How much he was in love with Carol only the heart of a nineteen-year-old could attest.