Shut
The two girls had not settled to work when the door of the small room was pushed cautiously open and Mr. Grig came in--as it were by stealth. Milly, prolonging her sweet hour of authority in the large room, had not yet returned to her mates. By a glance and a gesture Mr. Grig prevented the girls from any exclamation of surprise. Evidently he was secreting himself from his sister, and he must have entered the office without a sound. He looked older, worn, worried, captious--as though he needed balm and solace and treatment at once firm and infinitely soft. Lilian, who a few minutes earlier had been recalcitrant to Miss Grig's theory that women must protect men, now felt a desire to protect Mr. Grig, to save him exquisitely from anxieties unsuited to his temperament.
He shut the door, and in the intimacy of the room faced the two girls, one so devoted, the other perhaps equally devoted but whose devotion was outshone by her brilliant beauty. For him both typists were very young, but they were both women, familiar beings whom the crisis had transformed from typists into angels of succour; and he had ceased to be an employer and become a man who demanded the aid of women and knew how to rend their hearts.
"Is she in there?" he snapped, with a movement of the head towards the principals' room.
"Yes," breathed Lilian.
"Yes," said Gertie. "Oh! Mr. Grig, she ought never to have come out in her state!"
"Well, God damn it, of course she oughtn't!" retorted Mr. Grig. His language, unprecedented in that room, ought to have shocked the respectable girls, but did not in the slightest degree. To judge from their demeanour they might have been living all their lives in an environment of blasphemous profanity. "Didn't I do everything I could to keep her at home?"
"Oh! I know you did!" Gertie agreed sympathetically. "She told me."
"I made a hades of a row with her about it in the hope of keeping her in the house. But it was no use. I swore I wouldn't move until she returned. But of course I've got to do something. Look here, one of you must go to her and tell her I'm waiting in a taxi downstairs to take her home, and that I shall stick in it till she gives way, even if I'm there all day. That ought to shift her. Tell her I've arranged for the doctor to be at the house at a quarter to eleven. You'd better go and do it, Miss Jackson. She's more likely to listen to you."
"Yes, do, Gertie! You go," Lilian seconded the instruction. Then: "What's the matter, Gertie? What on earth's the matter?"