Opening a glass door and entering a passageway, the old man stumbled along it till another door, standing open, showed Miss Ruddick, beside her typewriter, assorting her papers before going home. Miss Ruddick was a competent woman of thirty-five. She was in her present position of stenographer-secretary to the head of the banking house because Mr. Bickley, the efficiency expert, for whose opinion Mr. Collingham had a kind of reverence, had selected her for the job. Miss Ruddick cultivated her efficiency as another woman cultivates her voice or another her gift for dancing. Throwing off the weaknesses that spring from affection and softness of heart, she had steeled and oiled herself into a swiftly working, surely judging, and wholly impersonal business automaton. Ten years ago she would have felt sorry for a man in Josiah Follett's predicament. She would have felt sorry for him now had she not learned to her cost that sympathy diminished the accuracy of her work. Now she could turn him off as easily as an executioner the man condemned to death.
As a matter of fact, she knew that ten minutes previously the efficiency expert had been closeted with Mr. Collingham, dealing with this very case. With her own ears she had heard Mr. Bickley say:
"You will do as you think best, Mr. Collingham. Only, I can't help reminding you that once you admit any principle but that of supply and demand, business methods are at an end."
Miss Ruddick knew Mr. Collingham's inner struggle because she had been through it herself; but she knew, too, that to Mr. Collingham the efficiency expert was much what his physician is to a king. His advice may be distasteful, but it is a command. The most merciful thing now was rapidity of action, as with the application of the guillotine. It was mercy, therefore, to throw open instantly the door of Mr. Collingham's office, so that Josiah was forced to enter.
He stood meekly, feeling, doubtless, as the psalmist felt when all the ends of the world had come upon him. Confusedly he was saying to himself that all the threads of his laborious life, from the time when, as a boy in Canada, he had begun to earn his living at sixteen, till now, when he was sixty-three, had been drawn together at just this point, where he was either to get his raise or else——
The suspense was terrible. As the August Presence into which he had been ushered was engaged in examining the contents of a lower drawer of the flat-topped desk at which It was seated, It was only partly visible. All Josiah could see was the shoulder of a portly form, the edge of a pear-shaped pearl in a plum-colored tie, and a temple of grizzled hair. The clerk moved forward, coming to a halt midway between the door and the desk till the Presence should recognize his approach by raising Its head.
The Presence didn't quite raise Its head. It merely glanced upward in a casual, sidelong way, continuing the inspection of the drawer.
"Well, Follett, I suppose you know what I've got to say?"
Follett betrayed the fact that he did know.
"Is it the same as you said two years ago, sir?"