“Well! Seems to me there’s a good deal in the idea that a poor husband is better than none,” came philosophically from Miss Holt, whose back is always curved like a banana over her typing-table, and who “smarms” her dull brown hair down under a hair-net until her head looks like a chocolate. “After all, my dear,[2] if you’re married, you’re married; and nobody can say you aren’t. But if you aren’t married, you aren’t. And nobody can say you are!”.

[2]

“How true,” said Miss Robinson dreamily. “Got that, Miss Trant?”

And she gave a sardonic glance towards me, to see if I was thoroughly taking this in. I was trying not to. The buzz of Cockney whispering which goes on, intermittently, all day long in our murky “typists’-room” was beginning to get on my nerves again almost as badly as it did in the first week that I worked at the Near Oriental Shipping Agency. I didn’t raise my eyes. Then, above the click and the buzz, came a shriller:

“Miss Trant, if you please?”

My fingers fell from the typewriter, and I looked up with a start into the sharp little South-London face of our smallest office-boy.

“Yes? What is it, Harold?”

“Miss Trant, Mr. Waters says he wishes to see you in his private room at two o’clock.”

“To see me?” I asked in a panic; hoping that it might not be true, that by some lucky chance my ears had deceived me. They hadn’t.

“Yes; at two o’clock sharp, miss.”

“Very well, Harold,” I heard myself say in a small, dismayed voice.

Then I heard the door of our room shut upon the office-boy’s exit.

[3]

[3]

I turned, to meet the shrewd, sympathetic brown eyes of Miss Robinson over her machine.

“Governor sent for you?”

 Prev. P 4/226 next