“Huh! ...” he grunted, and frowned down at her.  “Brains,” he said.  “Mighty good thing to have.  Took brains to be able to think that—­and say it.”  He turned away, then said, suddenly, over his shoulder, “Got any bombs in your desk?”

“Bombs! ...”

“Because,” he said, with no trace of a smile, “we don’t allow little girls to bring bombs in here. ...  If you see anything around that you think needs an infernal machine set off under it, why, you come and tell me.  See? ...  Tell me before you explode anything—­not after.  You anarchists are apt to get the cart before the horse.”

“I’m not an anarchist, Mr. Lightener.”

“Huh! ...  What are you, then?”

“I think—­I’m sure I’m a Socialist.”

“All of the same piece of cloth. ...  Mind, if you feel a bomb coming on—­see me about it.”  He walked away to stop by the desk of a mailing clerk and enter into some kind of conversation with the boy.

Ruth looked after him in a sort of daze.  Then she heard the girls about her laughing.

“You’ve passed your examination, Miss Frazer,” said the girl at the next desk.  “Everybody has to. ...  You never can tell what he’s going to do, but he’s a dear.  Don’t let him scare you.  If he thought he had he’d be tickled to death—­and then he’d find some way to show you you needn’t be at all.”

“Oh!” said Ruth.

More than once she saw laboring men, machinists, men in greasy overalls, with grimy hands and smeared faces, pass into Malcolm Lightener’s office, and come out with the Big Boss walking beside them, talking in a familiar, gruff, interested way.  She was startled sometimes to hear such men address him by his first name—­and to see no lightning from heaven flash blastingly.  She was positively startled once when a machinist flatly contradicted Lightener in her hearing on some matter pertaining to his work.

“That hain’t the way at all,” the man said, flatly.  Ruth waited for the explosion.

“Landers planned it that way.”  Landers was chief engineer in the plant, drawing a princely salary.

“Landers is off his nut.  He got it out of a book.  I’m doin’ it.  I tell you it won’t work.”

“Why?” Always Lightener had a why.  He was constantly shooting it at folks, and it behooved them to have a convincing answer.  The machinist had, and he set it forth at length and technically.  Lightener listened.

“You win,” he said, when the man was done.  That was all.

More than once Ruth saw Hilda Lightener in the office.  Usually the girls in an office fancy they have a grudge against the fortunate daughter of their employer.  They are sure she snubs them, or is a snob, or likes to show off her feathers before them.  This was notably absent in Hilda’s case.  She knew many by name and stopped to chat with them.  She was simple, pleasant, guiltless of pomp and circumstance in her comings and goings.