HIS OFFICIAL FIANCÉE
CHAPTER I
THE SUMMONS
“‘A girl without a sweetheart,’ girls—(I was readin’ something about it this very morning ’s I was coming along in the Toob),” chattered little Miss Holt over her work. “A girl without a sweetheart is like a ship at sea, without knowing what port she’s to put in at——”
“Accounts for the way a lot of ’em seem to pick their sweethearts on the principle ‘Any port in a storm!’” said Miss Robinson, with her little sniff.
“Well! Seems to me there’s a good deal in the idea that a poor husband is better than none,” came philosophically from Miss Holt, whose back is always curved like a banana over her typing-table, and who “smarms” her dull brown hair down under a hair-net until her head looks like a chocolate. “After all, my dear, if you’re married, you’re married; and nobody can say you aren’t. But if you aren’t married, you aren’t. And nobody can say you are!”.
“How true,” said Miss Robinson dreamily. “Got that, Miss Trant?”
And she gave a sardonic glance towards me, to see if I was thoroughly taking this in. I was trying not to. The buzz of Cockney whispering which goes on, intermittently, all day long in our murky “typists’-room” was beginning to get on my nerves again almost as badly as it did in the first week that I worked at the Near Oriental Shipping Agency. I didn’t raise my eyes. Then, above the click and the buzz, came a shriller:
“Miss Trant, if you please?”
My fingers fell from the typewriter, and I looked up with a start into the sharp little South-London face of our smallest office-boy.