to maid under quite such unromantic circumstances before, and that I had better take Still Waters’ gift as ostentatiously as I could. I tucked the sweet crimson blooms into the breast of my blue serge coat. As we whizzed citywards in a taxi, the Governor spoke again. “Now, Miss Trant, there is another suggestion I have to make to you,” he began. “To begin with, if I may say so, I like the way you dress.” Crisp, concise, business-like syllables; no girl could have interpreted them into a compliment! [61] [61] “I like the way you go to business—always neat, always ladylike. No ear-rings, no dingle-dangles and low necks like some of them; always a very clean collar and a quiet tie, I notice—just the thing for the office. But when I take you out rather more, I suppose you will have to have one or two rather special evening gowns and afternoon frocks, and theatre-wraps, and so on. I don’t know what they’re called. No doubt you know the kind of thing to order. All part of the arrangement, you understand. I’ll get a friend of mine in the City, whose wife runs a really first-class dressmaking business, to let me have the address; and then you will go to her—” All cut-and-dried, like all his other schemes! But this was something different—very different as well. —“have yourself fitted out with all that is necessary, and send in the bills to me.” “Please, no. Not that,” I heard myself say quickly. My employer turned upon me a face with some of the imperturbability quite jerked out of it by surprise. “What’s that?” “If you don’t mind, I can’t—I would rather not do so as you suggest about that,” said I, holding my head very high, but feeling myself turn as crimson as the flowers in my coat, and[62] speaking rather shakily, for this was the first time I had ever asserted my own feelings in even the mildest way before him. “I—I know it seems like straining at a gnat after all the camels that I am preparing to swallow. Of course I will get the frocks and things. Only—please, you must allow me to pay for them out of my allowance—my salary.” [62] He
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