“Don’t you see the awful sameness in these designs, for one thing? You men seem to think that if you get four walls and a roof, everything is all right. Can’t you understand that one woman wants something different from another one?”
There certainly was a monotony about the designs, now I came to look at them.
“Now here’s a suggestion,” she went on. “It may not be practical, but it’s your business to make it practicable, and not simply to accept what another man tells you is possible or impossible. You say that your trouble is that you want to standardise, so as to make production on a large scale easy. So you’ve simply set out to standardise your finished product; and you want to build so many houses of one type and so many of another type and let your people choose between the two types. Now my idea is quite different. Suppose that you were to standardise your material so that it is capable of adaptation? You see what I mean?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.
“Like Meccano. You get a dozen strips of metal and some screws and wheels; and out of that you can build fifty different models, using the same pieces in each model. Well, why not try to design your girders and beams and doors and so forth, in such a way that out of the same set you could erect a whole series of different houses. It doesn’t seem to me an impossibility if you get someone with brains to do it.”
“It sounds all right in theory; but I’m not so sure about the practical side.”
“Of course if you put some old fogey on to it he won’t be able to do it; but try a young man who believes in the idea and you’ll get it done, I’m sure. It may mean making each part a little more complicated than it would normally be; but that doesn’t matter much in mass-production, does it?”
“It’s not an insuperable difficulty.”
“Well, another thing. Get your architect to draw up sketches of all the possible combinations he can get out of his standardised material; and then when people want a house, they can look at the different designs and among them all they are almost sure to find something that suits their taste. It is much better than your idea of three or four standard house-patterns, anyway.”
“I’ll see what can be done.”
“Oh, the thing will be easy enough if you mean to have it. A child can build endless castles with a single box of bricks; and surely a man’s brain ought to be able to do with beams and joists what a child does with bricks.”
I give this as an example of her suggestions. Some of her improvements seemed trivial to me; but I took it that it was just these trivial things that made all the difference to a feminine mind; so I followed her more or less blindly.
Our collaboration was an ideal one, notwithstanding some hard-fought debatable points. More and more, as time went on, I began to understand the wisdom Nordenholt had shown in demanding that I should take her into partnership. Our minds worked on totally different lines; but for that very reason we completed each other, one seeing what the other missed. I found that she was open to conviction if one could actually put a finger on any weak point in her schemes.
And, behind the details of our plans, I began to see more and more clearly the outlines of her character. I suppose that most men, thrown into daily contact with any girl above the average in looks and brains, will drift into some sort of admiration which is hardly platonic; but in these affairs propinquity usually completes what it has begun by showing up weak points in character or little mannerisms which end by repelling instead of attracting. In a drawing-room, people are always on their guard to some extent; but in the midst of absorbing work, real character comes out. One sees gaps in intelligence; failures to follow out a line of thought become apparent; any inharmony in character soon makes itself felt. One seldom sees teachers marrying their girl-students. But in Elsa Huntingtower I found a brain as good as my own, though working along different lines. I expect that her association with Nordenholt had given her chances which few girls ever have; but she had natural abilities which had been sharpened by that contact. She puzzled me, I must admit. My mind works very much in the concrete; I like to see every step along the road, to test each foothold before trusting my weight upon it. To me, her mental processes seemed to depend more upon some intuition than did mine; but I believe now that her reasoning was as rigid as my own and that it seemed disjointed merely because her steps were different from mine. My brain worked in arithmetical progression, if I may put it so, whilst hers followed a geometrical progression. Often it was a dead heat between the hare and the tortoise; for my steady advance attained the goal just when her mysterious leaps of intelligence had brought her to the same point by a different path.
It was not until we had cleared the ground of the main practical difficulties that we allowed ourselves to think of the future. At first, everything was subordinated to the necessity of getting something coherent planned which would be ready for the ensuing stage after the Nitrogen Area had done its work. But once we
