“And—er—that will be all, this afternoon, thank you. You will hand your notes of my letters to Mr. Alexander. If you have arrangements to make, you can leave as early as you choose to-day.”
“Thank you, Mr. Waters.”
Feeling that I couldn’t have stood another minute of him and his “arrangements,” I walked quickly out of the room and down the passage.
Round a corner, I heard the voice of our office mimic, who had slipped out on some pretext, in full flow of narrating to one of the telephone girls the amazing news that I know was being buzzed all over the Near Oriental offices.
—“but, my dear, the little Trant gives out she’s madly in love with him! She says”—here a most successful imitation of my own voice—“‘Whatever else I may be doing, I am NOT marrying him for his money!’”
“P’raps it’s for his kind heart and his charm of manner, I don’t think,” suggested the telephone girl. “Or his good looks, eh?”
“Nothing actually the matter with his looks, my girl. Anyhow, he does always look as if he went in for no end of cold water, and week-end tramps, and golf, and the windows wide open, and decent soap—cuticura, I’ve smelt it,” said Miss Robinson. “And as if he could heave things—which nobody else does, in this establishment. And if you can get over the general effect of ‘the stern-and-solemn-Nelson’s column——’”
“Well, I can’t. But she’s quite pretty if she’d only make a little more of herself; p’raps she will now,” said the telephone girl, who wears long coral drop-earrings and pins brown-paper cuffs over her sleeves in business-hours. “What on earth do you suppose he said when he proposed to her?”
“‘Now, Miss Trant, when you have taken down that Buenos Ayres order, there is something I have to consult you about personally. Now, Miss Trant, are you prepared to consider——’”
It was so exactly our employer’s voice that I, standing there unnoticed, burst out laughing. The girls, caught out, laughed too.