was a great discovery.  Absurdly easy to raise yourself to be the idol of a crowd that fancies itself canny!  Incredibly easy!  I used to take their part against the works-manager as often as I could; he was a fiend; he hated me; but then I was a fiend, too, and I hated him more.  I used often to come on at six in the morning, when they did, and ‘sign on’.  It isn’t really signing on now at all; there’s a clock dial and a whole machine for catching you out.  They loved to see me doing that.  And I worked the lathes sometimes, just for a bit, just to show that I wasn’t ashamed to work.  Etc....  All that sentimental twaddle.  It pleased them.  And if any really vigorous-minded girl had dared to say it was sentimental twaddle, there would have been a crucifixion or something of the sort in the cloak-rooms.  The mob’s always the same.  But what pleased them far more than anything was me knowing them by their Christian names.  Not all, of course; still, hundreds of them.  Marvellous feats of memorising I did!  I used to go about muttering under my breath:  ’Winnie, wart on left hand, Winnie, wart on left hand, wart on left hand, Winnie.’  You see?  And I’ve sworn at them—­not often; it wouldn’t do, naturally.  But there was scarcely a woman there that I couldn’t simply blast in two seconds if I felt like it.  On the other hand, I assure you I could be very tender.  I was surprised how tender I could be, now and then, in my little office.  They’d tell me anything—­sounds sentimental, but they would—­and some of them had no more notion that there’s such a thing on earth as propriety than a monkey has.  I thought I knew everything before I went to the Clyde valley.  Well, I didn’t.”  Concepcion looked at G.J.  “You know you’re very innocent, G.J., compared to me.”

“I should hope so!” said G.J., impenetrably.

“What do you think of it all?” she demanded in a fresh tone, leaning a little towards him.

He replied:  “I’m impressed.”

He was, in fact, very profoundly impressed; but he had to illustrate the hardness in himself which she had revealed to him. (He wondered whether the members of the Lechford Committee really did credit him with having dethroned a couple of chairmen.  The idea was new to his modesty.  Perhaps he had been underestimating his own weight on the committee.  No doubt he had.) All constraint was now dissipated between Concepcion and himself.  They were behaving to each other as though their intimacy had never been interrupted for a single week.  She amazed him, sitting there in the purple stockings and the affronting gown, and he admired.  Her material achievement alone was prodigious.  He pictured her as she rose in the winter dark and in the summer dawn to go to the works and wrestle with so much incalculable human nature and so many complex questions of organisation, day after day, week after week, month after month, for nearly eighteen months.  She had kept it up; that was the point.  She had shown what she was made of, and what she was made of was unquestionably marvellous.