She now had frequent friendly conversations with Mouret. When she went to the office to take orders and furnish information, he kept her talking, enjoying the sound of her voice. It was what she laughingly called “making a good man of him.” In her prudent, cautious Norman head there sprang up all sorts of projects, ideas about the new business which she had already ventured to hint at when at Robineau's, and some of which she had expressed on the evening of their walk in the Tuileries gardens. She could not be occupied in any matter, see any work going on, without being moved with a desire to introduce some improvement in the mechanism. Then, since her entry into The Ladies' Paradise, she was especially pained by the precarious position of the employees; the sudden dismissals shocked her, she thought them iniquitous and stupid, hurtful to all, to the house as much as to the staff. Her former sufferings were still fresh in her mind, and her heart was seized with pity every time she saw a new comer, her feet bruised, her eyes dim with tears, dragging herself along in her misery in her silk dress, amidst the spiteful persecution of the old hands. This dog's life made the best of them bad; and the sad work of destruction commenced: all eaten up by the trade before the age of forty, disappearing, falling into unknown places, a great many dying in harness, some of consumption and exhaustion, others of fatigue and bad air, a few thrown on the street, the happiest married, buried in some little provincial shop. Was it humane, was it just, this frightful consumption of human life that the big shops carried on every year? And she pleaded the cause of the wheel-work of the colossal machine, not from any sentimental reasons, but by arguments appealing to the very interests of the employers. To make a machine solid and strong, it is necessary to use good iron; if the iron breaks or is broken, there is a stoppage of work, repeated expenses of starting, quite a loss of power.