“Oh, certainly,” I said, wondering what in the world this additional “order” might be. The girls didn’t “wonder.” I know they thought it was for another good-bye—especially Smithie, one-idea’d simpleton! I felt her demure little smile in the small of my back as I turned to the door. Mr. Dundonald—oh, unprecedented occurrence!—held it open for me, murmuring, as I passed out, “Miss Trant! May I be permitted to proffer my very heartiest good wishes on the occasion of this—this delightful announcement?”
“Oh! Thank you so much,” I said pleasantly. (“Worm!” I thought.)
So the Governor had told Mr. Dundonald while I was receiving the congratulations of my colleagues....
I saw in his eye—grey, fishy, and always looking as if “the Main Chance” were plainly visible just ahead of any person he addressed—that already my personality had changed from that of the twenty-five-shillings-a-week typist, clad in her “all-I’ve-got” serge costume and liable to dismissal at his hands, to that of young Mrs. William Waters, who, gorgeous in silk, satin and sables, would one of these days be calling at the office to pick up the head of the firm and to motor him home with her! Mr. Dundonald’s new manner was a forecast of his reception of me when that day should dawn!
If he only knew!
“Sorry to trouble you again,” said the Governor as I presented myself before him once more. “I forgot, in the middle of all that other business”—this, I suppose, might have applied to either the dictating of his letters, or the choosing of his betrothal ring—“to tell you that I intend to let my mother know, to-night, about this engagement of ours.”
“Oh, yes.”
“You will probably hear from her to-morrow, inviting you to stay at our house—it’s near Sevenoaks. You had better send in your formal resignation to the office at once, and make your arrangements to come on for a fortnight’s visit or so, in a few days. Will that be convenient to you?”
“Oh, perfectly,” I said obediently, hoping that I did not show any outward symptoms of that sick feeling of panic that possessed me. To stay at the Governor’s house? So soon? Horrors! With the Governor’s mother? What will she be like? Exactly like him, probably, only far more forbidding; women can always be more alarming than even the most terrifying of men. An elderly feminine edition of Still Waters! Ye gods! And she will hate me, of course; look upon me as that designing minx of a typist who had “got round” her son in business-hours and prevented him from “doing well for himself” in some other direction. People with money always want their children to marry people with more! It will be Lady Vandeleur over again, only worse. How appalling! Perhaps she will make herself as disagreeable to me as possible, in the hope of inducing me to feel that I should never be able to stand such a mother-in-law, and that I should simply have to break it off!—which, under the circumstances, I’m powerless to do!