"Miss Gladfoot," my interlocutrice murmured, "won't you ask Miss Bryne to step here?"
Miss Bryne having stepped there, I found myself face to face with a competent woman of fifty or so, short, square, square-faced, and astute. She also had a pencil and note-book in her hand, and, seeing me, looked receptive, too, though remaining practical and business-like.
While the young lady at the desk explained me as far as she had been able to understand my object, delicacy urged me out of earshot. I had, therefore, not heard what passed when Miss Bryne came forward to take charge of the situation.
"What you are is a kind of educated handyman. Wouldn't that be it?"
Delighted at this discriminating view of my capacities, I faltered that it would be.
"Well, we don't often have a call for your kind of specialty, and yet we do have them sometimes. There might be one to-day, and then again there mightn't be for another six months. Now you can either go in and wait on the chance, or you can leave your address and we'll 'phone you if anything should turn up that we think would suit."
Encouraged by this kindly treatment and the possibility of a call that day, I opted for going in to wait.
"Then come this way."
Following the Napoleonic figure down the narrow passageway, I was shown into a little room, where five other men sat with the dismayed, melancholy faces of dogs at a dog-show at minutes when they are not barking. Dismayed and melancholy on my side, I took the seat nearest the door, feeling like a prisoner in the dock or the cell, and wondering what would happen next.
Nothing happened next so far as I was concerned, but I had a gratifying leisure in which to look about me.