She said with a sudden eagerness, “Harry, it’s a very big thing for me, for Field’s. I meant a small thing in the sense not to be made a fuss about.”
He made very slowly a negative movement with his head. “I don’t see it like that.”
“Let me tell you, Harry.”
She told him how the great possibilities of the department she had established in the bank rested on the personal touch established between herself and the clients. The scheme was that those possibilities should be developed to their fullest extent. While she was in London that personal touch could be established with clients by dozens. If she visited the branches in the East, at Bombay, at Rangoon, at Singapore, it was by hundreds that the touch could be established. That was it. Field’s customers would talk to her, and when she was returned they would talk of her, and would tell others of her, as one met, not during the jolly freedom of leave when the impulse was to feel that, after all, nothing mattered much, but met out there when they were in the yoke and the harness of the thing,—met as one fresh out from home in their particular interests and shortly, charged with their special interests, returning home. That was it! A novel mission, a valuable mission, her mission. About a year. To start in about six weeks. “There, Harry, that’s the plan.”
“And you are going?”
“I have agreed to go.”
He said slowly, “It astonishes me.”
There was then a pause.
She spoke. “I think I do not like your astonishment, Harry.”
“It is justified.”