"Next floor. Take the elevator. Ask for Miss Ruddick." The voice resumed its plaintiveness. "So we had him moved into the corner bedroom, and sent for a trained nurse—"
On getting out of the lift, Jennie found herself in a sort of lobby where applicants for interviews sat with the hangdog look which such postulants generally wear. A brisk little Jewess seated at a desk murmured the name of each newcomer into a telephone, after which there was nothing to do but take a chair and wait upon events. Now and then some one came out from his conference, whereupon a messenger girl, generally of Slavic or Hebraic type, would summon his successor.
It was nearly an hour before Jennie was called to the office of Miss Ruddick, who, with her practiced method of dealing with the importunate, prepared to put her rapidly through her paces and land her again at the lift. This Miss Ruddick did, not so much with the minimum of courtesy as with the maximum of conscientiousness. Her aim was to save Jennie's time as well as her own, in the altruistic spirit of Mr. Bickley's principles.
"How do you do? Are you the daughter of the Mr. Follett who used to be with us here? So sorry for your loss, though it may be a release for him, poor man. We never know, do we? Now what is it I can do for you?"
Jennie said again that she hoped to see Mr. Collingham.
"I think you'd better tell your errand to me."
"I couldn't. I can only tell it to him."
In saying this she supposed Miss Ruddick would understand the reference to be to Teddy, whose story must by this time be ringing through the bank. In spite of what Jackman had said on the previous afternoon, they couldn't keep so serious a crime secret for more than a matter of hours. But Miss Ruddick only seemed displeased by Jennie's insistence, answering coldly,
"If it's a job you're looking for, the best person to see would be—"
And just then the communicating door opened and Collingham himself came out. He was about to give some order to Miss Ruddick and pass on when Jennie rose in such a way that his eye fell upon her. When a man's eye fell upon Jennie his attention was generally arrested. In this case, it was the more definitely arrested, for the reason that Jennie, timidly and tremblingly, gave signs of having a request to make.