"N-no! Mr. Grig," she whimpered feebly.
Then she snatched at a sheet of paper and began to insert it in the machine before her, as though about to start some copying.
"Miss Grig is rather unwell," said Felix Grig. "She insisted that I should come up, and so I came." With that he tactfully left the room, obeying the wise rule of conduct under which a man conquers a woman's weeping by running away from it.
Lilian's face was red; it went still redder. She was tremendously ashamed of being caught blubbering, and by Mr. Grig! It would not have mattered if one of the girls had surprised her, or even Miss Grig. But Mr. Grig! Nor would it have mattered so much if circumstances had made possible any pretence, however absurd and false, that she was not in fact crying. But she had been trapped beyond any chance of a face-saving lie. She felt as though she had committed a sexual impropriety and could never look Mr. Grig in the eyes again. At the same time she was profoundly relieved that somebody belonging to the office, and especially a man, had arrived to break her awful solitude....
So Mr. Grig knew that she had a dance that night! There was something piquant and discomposing in that. Gertie Jackson must have chattered to Miss Grig--they were as thick as thieves, those two, or, at any rate, the good-natured Gertie flattered herself that they were--and Miss Grig must have told Felix. (Very discreetly the girls would refer among themselves to Mr. Grig as "Felix.") Brother and sister must have been talking about her and her miserable little dance. Still, a dance was a dance, and the mere word had a glorious sound. Nobody except herself knew that her dance was in a basement.... So he had not come to the office to relieve and reassure her in her unforeseen night-watch, but merely to placate his sister! And how casually, lightly, almost quizzically, he had spoken! She was naught to him--a girl typist, one among a floating population of girl typists.
Miss Grig had no distinction--her ankles proved that--but Felix was distinguished, in manner, in voice, in everything he did. Felix was a swell, like the easy flâneurs in Bond Street that she saw when she happened to go out of the office during work-hours. It was said that he had been married and that his wife had divorced him. Lilian surmised that if the truth were known the wife more than Felix had been to blame.
All these thoughts were mere foam on the great, darkly heaving thought that Felix had horribly misjudged her. Not his fault, of course; but he had misjudged her. Crying for a lost dance, indeed! She terribly wanted him to be made aware that she was only crying because she had experienced an ordeal to which she ought not to have been exposed and to which no girl ought to have been exposed. Miss Grig again! It was Miss Grig, not Felix, who had sneered at hold-ups. There had been no hold-up, but there might have been a hold-up, and, in any case, she had passed through the worst sensations of a hold-up. Scandalous!
Anxious to be effective, she took up the typing of a novel which had been sent in by one of their principal customers, a literary agency, and tried to tap as prosaically as if the hour were 11.30 A.M. instead of 11.30 P.M. Bravado! She knew that she would have to do the faulty sheet again; but she must impress Felix. Then she heard Felix calling from the principals' room:
"Miss Share. Miss Share!" A little impatient as usual.
"Yes, Mr. Grig." She rushed to the mirror and patted herself with the tiny sponge that under Miss Grig's orders was supposed to be employed for wetting postage stamps--but never was so employed save in Miss Grig's presence.