As she passed the entrance Gwenna's eyes rose to this lattice.
"It looks almost as high up in the air as one could fly in that biplane," she thought. "Oh, to be right up! Looking down on everything, with the blue beneath one instead of only above!"
She crossed the big yard, which was already vocal with the noises of chipping and hammering, the trampling and the voices of men. Two of them—the genial young electrician called Grant and the Yorkshire foreman who was a regular father to his gang, nodded good-morning to the youngest typist as she passed. She walked quickly past the stacks of new timber and the gantries and travelling cranes (plenty of machinery here; it ought to please Mr. Dampier, since he'd said that was what he was interested in!). One great square of the hewn granite was swinging in mid-air from a crane as she left the hot sunlight and noise outside and entered the door of the square, corrugated iron building that held the office where she worked.
To reach it she had to pass through the clerk-of-the-works' offices, with long drawing-benches with brass handled drawers beneath, full of plans, and elevations. These details seemed mysteriously, tantalisingly incomprehensible and yet irritating to Gwenna's feminine mind. She was imaginative enough to realise that all these details, these "man's-things," from the T-squares on the benches to the immense iron safe in the corner, seemed to put her, Gwenna, "in her place." She was merely another detail in the big whole of man's work that was going on here. The place made her feel tiny, unimportant. She went on to the light and airy room, smelling of new wood and tracing-paper, the extension of the clerk-of-the-works' office that she shared with her two colleagues.
In the centre of this room there was a large square table with a telephone, a telephone-book, various other books of reference and a shallow wicker basket for letters. Besides this there were the typing tables for each of the three girl-clerks. Gwenna's and Miss Baker's were side by side. The German girl sat nearest to the window that gave the view up the river, with Lambeth Bridge and the Houses of Parliament looming grey and stately against the smiling June sky, and a distant glimpse of Westminster Abbey. On the frame of the pane just above her Miss Baker had fastened, with drawing-pins, two photographs. One was a crude coloured postcard of a red-roofed village among pine-forests. The other was a portrait of a young man, moustached and smiling under a spiked German helmet; across this photograph ran the autograph, "Karl Becker." Thus the blue and guileless eyes of this young foreigner in our midst could rest upon mementoes of her Fatherland and her family any time she raised her blonde head from bending over her work. Both girls looked up this morning as Gwenna, the last arrival, came in. They scolded her good-naturedly because she'd brought none of those chocolates she'd promised from the dinner-table. They asked how she'd enjoyed herself at that party.
It would have been presumably natural to the young Welsh girl to have broken out into a bubblingly excited—"And, girls! Who d'you suppose I sat next. A real live airman! And, my dears!" (with a rapturous gasp), "who should it be but the one I bought the photo of on Saturday! You know; the one you called my young man—Mr. Dampier—Paul Dampier—Yes, but wait; that isn't all. Just fancy! He talked to me yards and yards about his new aeroplane, and I say, what do you think! This was the best. He's asked me to come up one day—yes, indeed! He's going to take me flying—with him!"
But, as it was, Gwenna said not one word of all this. She could not have explained why, even to herself. Only she replied to Miss Butcher's, "What was the party like?" with a flavourless, "Oh, it was all right, thanks."
That sounded so English, she thought!
She had a dull day at the office. Dry-as-dust letters and specifications, builders' quantities, and so on, to type out. Tiresome calls on the telephone that had to be put through to the other office....
Never before had she seemed to mind the monotony of those clicking keys and that "I'll inquire. Hold the line, please." Never before had she found herself irritated by the constant procession of men who were in and out all day; including Mr. Grant, who sometimes seemed to make errands to talk to Miss Butcher, but who never stayed for more than a moment, concluding invariably with the cheerful remark, "Well! Duty calls, I must away." Men seemed actually to enjoy "duty," Gwenna thought. At least the men here did. All of them, from Mr. Henderson in the other office to the brown-faced men in the yard with their shirt-sleeves rolled up above tattooed arms, seemed to be "keen" on the building, on the job in hand. They seemed glad to be together. Gwenna wondered how they could....