Until late at night the neighbors heard the sound of his tools and saw the glare of light through the cracks.
"The Smiths are giving a party to-night--I suppose we can't go?" Mrs. Ford said one evening, wistfully. "Oh, well--when the gasoline engine is finished--how long do you think it's going to take?"
"I don't know--I'm working on the cylinder now. I'll have to have a larger bore to get the speed--and then there'll be the transmission." Ford stopped speaking and was lost in the problems. He finished supper abstractedly and pushed back his chair.
"Oh, about the party. Too bad. I hope you don't mind much. When I get the gasoline engine finished," he said apologetically, and hurried out to work on it. In a few minutes he was absorbed with the cylinder.
He had found that day a piece of pipe, thrown into the scrap heap at the Edison plant, and it had struck him at once that it would do for his cylinder, and that using it would save him the time and work of making one. He brought it home, cut it to the right length and set it in the first Ford engine.
Meantime, in the house Mrs. Ford cleared away the supper dishes, took out her sewing and settled down with a sigh. The neighbors were going by to the Smiths' party. She could hear them laughing and calling to each other on the sidewalk outside. In the shed her husband was filing something; the rasp of the file on the metal sounded plainly.
After all, she thought, she might as well give up the idea of parties. She couldn't give one herself; she knew Henry would refuse to leave his hateful engine even for one evening. She was very homesick for Greenfield.
The months went by. Ford worked all day at the Edison plant, half the night in his own shop. The men he met in his work had taken to looking at him half in amusement, half in good-humored contempt. He was a "crank," they said. Some of the younger ones would laugh and tap their foreheads when he had gone past them.
One night he came home and found Mrs. Ford crying. The neighbors were saying that he was crazy, she sobbed. She'd told Mrs. Lessing just exactly what she thought of her, too, and she'd never speak to her again! But, oh, wouldn't he ever get that horrid engine finished so they could live like other people?