The stagings were black with men hurrying back and forth under the glare of the electrics, and the concrete gangs were laboring frantically to clear the wreck made by the crumbling mass, to the end that the carpenters might bulkhead the gap with timbers and planks to hold back the rising flood. The mixers had stopped temporarily, but the machinery was held in readiness to go into action the moment the débris should be removed and the new forms locked into place. Every now and then one of Williams's assistants, a red-headed young fellow with a voice like a fog-horn, took readings of the climbing river level from a gauge in the slack water, calling out the figures in a singsong chant: "Nineteen _six_! Nineteen six and a _quarter_! Nineteen six and a _half_!" "Get a move, you fellows there on the stage!" yelled Williams. "She's coming up faster than usual to-night! Double pay if you get that bulkhead in before the tide wets your feet!" Smith felt as if he ought to get out of the car and help, but there was nothing he could do. Miss Richlander had been silent for the better part of the drive from town, but now she began to talk. "So this is what you left Lawrenceville for, is it, Montague?" she said, knitting her perfect brows at the hubbub and strife. "If I were not here, I believe you would be down there, struggling with the rest of them." "I certainly should," he answered briefly, adding: "not that I should be of much use." "There are a good many easier ways of making money," she offered, including the entire industrial strife in the implied detraction. "This is a man's way, asking for all--and the best--there is in a man," he asserted. "You can't understand, of course; you have eaten the bread of profits and discount and interest all your life. But here is something really creative. The world will be the richer for what is being done here; more mouths can be filled and more backs clothed. That is the true test of wealth, and the only test." "And you are willing to live in a raw wilderness for the sake of having a part in these crudities?" "I may say that I had no choice, at first; it was this or nothing. But I may also say that whatever the future may do to me, I shall always have it to remember that for a little time I was a man, and not a tailor's model." "Is that the way you are thinking now of your former life?" she gibed. "It is the truth. The man you knew in Lawrenceville cared more for the set of a coat, for the color of a tie, for conventional ease and the little luxuries, than he did for his soul. And nobody thought enough of him to kick him alive and show him that he was strangling the only part of him that was at all worth saving."