carnations. It might have been a bunch of withered wall-flowers that had been left too long in water, for the disgusted wrinkle that lifted the prettiest typist’s small, powdered nose.

“I wouldn’t touch them,” it seemed to say.

“Not those flowers.” ...

And at last I saw why.

The reason my three colleagues had forborne to question, or chaff, or even look at me when I came in from that expedition with the Governor was not because they were too considerate, too puzzled, or too wily.

It was merely because they were shocked—scandalized!

They were thinking worse things of me than I thought I saw behind Lady Vandeleur’s lifted lorgnette. I found myself suspected—probably more than suspected!—of having run counter to the standards of a class which is perhaps more innately virtuous than Lady Vandeleur’s and my own and Cicely’s, and certainly more rigid in its judgments. I[70] remembered gossip about typists and their employers, gossip from the days when I was taking my training at Pitman’s. And out of this I could imagine for myself the tone of the talk about me that had passed across that marble-topped table in the “Den of Lyons” at lunch-time.

[70]

“Well, Still Waters have been running deep, with a vengeance! This is the meaning of her taking down his letters for a whole fortnight—without any complaints, girls! We might have seen there was something funny in that!”

“She’s been pretty artful, too, not letting on that there was anything at all, until to-day!—And there must have been some sort of beginning. A girl’s boss doesn’t take her out to a swagger lunch, with flowers and a new hat and all, without there’s been some sort of a leading up to it!”

Perhaps Miss Robinson might suggest—“Well, I should never have thought she’d been that kind of girl. Fact of the matter is, I suppose she funked losing her job if she didn’t.”

But Smithie and Miss Holt would chorus vehemently, “She ought to have lost her job, first! I would!—And chance it!”

Yes; according to this jury of maidens, I was already pronounced “Guilty.”

And, innocent as I was of anything they would have thought “mattered” in the least—for[71] I don’t think the keeping-up of a false engagement would have outraged their conventions at all in 

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