It wasn't likely that the Aeroplane Lady kept her clerk, or whatever she was, in her pocket, he'd thought.
He'd just be taken to where the P.D.Q. was being assembled, he'd supposed. The Little Thing would be kept busy with her typing and one thing and another in some special office, he'd expected!
What he had not expected to find was the scene before him. The Little Thing idling about outside the shops here; hatless, pinafored, looking absolutely top-hole and perfectly at home, chatting with the ginger-haired bloke who was unloading the engine as if he were no end of a pal of hers! She was smiling up into his face and taking a most uncommon amount of interest, it seemed, in what the fellow had been doing!
And, before, she'd said she wasn't interested in machinery! thought Dampier as he came up, feeling suddenly unconscionably angry.
He forgot the hours that the Little Thing had already passed in hanging on every word, mostly about a machine, that had fallen from his own lips. He only remembered that moment at the Smiths' dinner-party, when she'd admitted that that sort of thing didn't appeal to her.
Yet, here she was! Deep in it, by Jove!
He had come right up to her and this other chap before they noticed him....
She turned sharply at the sound of the young aviator's rather stiff "Good afternoon."
She had expected that day to see his engine—no more. Here he stood, the maker of the engine, backed by the scorched, flat landscape, in the sunlight that picked out little clean-cut, intense shadows under the rim of his straw hat, below his cleft chin, along his sleeve and the lapel of his jacket, making him look (she thought) like a very good snapshot of himself. He had startled her again; but this time she was self-possessed.
She came forward and faced him; prettier than ever, somehow (he thought again), with tossed curls and pinafore blowing all about her. She might have been a little schoolgirl let loose from some class in those gaunt buildings behind her. But she spoke in a more "grown-up" manner, in some way, than he'd ever heard her speak before. Looking up, she said in the soft accent that always brought back to him his boyish holidays in her country, "How do you do, Mr. Dampier? I'm afraid I can't shake hands. Mine are all sticky with dope."