For the first time in my life I really felt like thanking him. And yet he’d only done the most ordinary thing that one would expect the most ordinary man to take as a matter of course. Only the custom-honoured practice of the Near Oriental is to refuse to regard its head as an ordinary man. Of course, he isn’t. There are advantages in making a presupposition of this kind, perfectly clear from the very start!
Feeling comparatively at ease and my own mistress again, I entered the typists’ room with my head as high as it had been when I marched out to the lift at lunch-time after Miss Robinson’s voicing of what they all thought of me.
Miss Robinson, with her shrewd face startled into the likeness of someone much younger and less astute, broke away from the other two—they had been all three chattering and knotted up together in the corner by the cupboard where the tea-things are kept—and came frankly towards me.
“Well, Miss Trant! Here’s some news we’ve just had sprung on us,” said she, speaking as if she found great difficulty in sorting out her words. “I must say—well, really! Gracious! Are you going to shake hands and let us congratulate you, as I suppose is the right thing, or are you feeling wild with me about this morning? We didn’t know, you know. We never dreamed——! How was anyone to guess, after all——!”
“Of course you couldn’t,” I said, shaking hands with one after the other. “And of course I’m not feeling ‘wild!’” My revenge was to hand if I wanted it. But somehow I didn’t feel it would be worth it, now. Though, as a matter of fact, the reminder of what I had felt that morning had brought some of it surging back over me again. And this feeling was not improved by the wording of little Miss Holt’s felicitations.
“‘Wild?’ I should think Miss Trant was ready to pat herself on the back for the next week, eh? Who’d ’a thought of this, that day we were all trying to buck her up at lunch when she was afraid she was going to get the sack? Didn’t I say then, though, that Miss Trant would do all right because she’d got a taking way with men? But—the Governor himself—that we never did look upon as just a ‘man!’ Well, you never can tell!”
“I shall never try to, after this afternoon,” announced Miss Robinson. “Not after his marching in at that door there, and saying, in quite a human sort of voice—not his own voice at all—that is, you’ll excuse me, Miss Trant! You know what I mean!—saying, ‘I have some news to tell you ladies. Miss Trant and I are engaged to be married!’”
“Married to the head of the firm—my hat!” breathed Miss Holt, devouring me with her eyes, as if she thought that by staring hard enough she might discover the secret of how one achieved this giddy height. “Too grand to speak to any of us after this! Look at that ring of hers! Think of all that means!”—
Yes! If she only could!
—“No more turning out to get to business every morning, wet or dry, with the mud still stiff on your skirt that you haven’t had time to brush! No more lining up with the crowd to wait for that beastly old workman’s tram at the ‘Elephant!’ No more strap-hanging! No more packed motor-buses with flower-women, and goodness knows what, shoving their baskets into you and trampling on your feet as they get in!” She took breath, and then, for fear one of the others should interrupt before she finished this harangue upon the Dignity of Labour, she hurried on—“No more having to keep on at it if you are ready to drop and your eyes popping out of your head—no more A.B.C. girls not taking the slightest notice of your order and then giving you sauce because you’ve waited half an hour for your lunch—no more slaving from har’-past nine to six for her any more!... I suppose you know you’re most awfully lucky?”