But Cally explained how floors and machines had got upon her nerves. This was, she said, _our_ first point to settle. And thereupon the young man at once addressed himself to the question of remedies; sketching with his finger on the table-top, till she got note-paper and pencils from mamma's desk in the corner, switched light into a reading-lamp, and came and sat down beside him. On the paper V.V. obligingly produced an outline of the three floors of the present factory, accurately locating stairway and elevator shaft; even the point where the cloak-room was to be knocked out to give the space needed for the new machines.... "How in the world do you know so much about the Works?" "Oh--well, you see, the shipping clerk there is quite a friend of mine," said V.V. "A very nice fellow, sort of a Lithuanian, named Dolak. Don't be offended, but I--I've been down there once or twice at night." However, he seemed stumped as to the best method of support, admitting that it was not so simple as it seemed. And presently, when he had tried and condemned columns from floor to floor, the girl said, hesitatingly: "Dr. Vivian, do you think props--outside--would do any good?" He turned his intent gaze upon her; he was frowning absorbedly and looking rather doubtful about it all. "I mean iron braces running from the ground on each side of the building," said Cally--"and holding up girders, or whatever you call them, under the bunching-room floor?" He gazed a moment, and then exclaimed: "Oh--good! _Oh, that's good_!... That would do it--do it perfectly!..." He proceeded with eagerness to sketch in her square-arch braces under his bunching-room floor, and he said again: "Perfect solution!... Why, you ought to have been a builder!" "Oh, I--just happened to see a picture of something like that in the encyclopædia this afternoon." Her tone was depreciatory, not suggesting that she had looked some time before she happened to see that picture. But within she was feeling the strangest, the most exhilarating thrills.... Oh, the clearness of being a _fellow-worker_; of praise that had nothing to do with a candidacy for matrimony!... "But the difficulty," she said, "is to persuade papa to let me do it. Of course, I've no right to expect him to take me seriously.... I know _you_ could persuade him." That, spoken impulsively, she hurriedly covered up in conversation; begging him to go on at once and give her his ideas of what the new building should be like. She had gathered by now, that, whatever he considered wonderful in all this, it was not the fact that he, she, and her father should be, so to say, planning it shoulder to shoulder. But this fine unconsciousness of his she herself could not match; not at least till she had had more time to smooth things over with her father....