Back he came with a cluster of great red, fragrant carnations, which he handed to me.
“Oh, but really you should not have——” I was beginning, when I realized that this also was part of the business—that never had flowers been offered from man to maid under quite such unromantic circumstances before, and that I had better take Still Waters’ gift as ostentatiously as I could.
I tucked the sweet crimson blooms into the breast of my blue serge coat.
As we whizzed citywards in a taxi, the Governor spoke again.
“Now, Miss Trant, there is another suggestion I have to make to you,” he began. “To begin with, if I may say so, I like the way you dress.”
Crisp, concise, business-like syllables; no girl could have interpreted them into a compliment!
“I like the way you go to business—always neat, always ladylike. No ear-rings, no dingle-dangles and low necks like some of them; always a very clean collar and a quiet tie, I notice—just the thing for the office. But when I take you out rather more, I suppose you will have to have one or two rather special evening gowns and afternoon frocks, and theatre-wraps, and so on. I don’t know what they’re called. No doubt you know the kind of thing to order. All part of the arrangement, you understand. I’ll get a friend of mine in the City, whose wife runs a really first-class dressmaking business, to let me have the address; and then you will go to her—”
All cut-and-dried, like all his other schemes! But this was something different—very different as well.
—“have yourself fitted out with all that is necessary, and send in the bills to me.”