To-day she was all out of tune. She was quite cross when, for the second time, Albert, the seventeen-year old Cockney office-boy, bustled in, stamping a little louder than was strictly necessary on the echoing boards. He rubbed his hands together importantly, demanding in a voice that began in a bass roar and ended in a treble squeak, "Those specifications, miss. Quick, too, or you'll hear about it!"
"Goodness me, what an ugly way you London boys do have of talking!" retorted the Welsh girl pettishly. "Sut-ch an accent!"
The rebuked Albert only snorted with laughter as he took her sheaf of papers. Then, looking back over his shoulder at the pretty typist perched on the edge of the centre table to refill her fountain pen, he added in his breaking treble, "Don't you sit on that tyble, Miss! Sittin' on the tyble's s'posed to mean you want to be kissed, and it looks so bad! Don't it, Miss Butcher? There's other ways of gittin' orf than that, isn't there?"
"Outside!" snapped Miss Butcher, blushing, as the boy stumped away.
Gwenna sighed angrily and longed for lunch-time, so that she could get out.
At one o'clock, an hour after the buzzer had sounded for the mid-day meal of the yard-men, the other two girls in the office would not even come out for a breath of air. They had brought fruit and cake. They made Bovril (with a kettle of hot water begged from the fatherly foreman) and lunched where they'd sat all the morning. Miss Butcher, munching, was deep in a library-book lent to her by the young electrician. Miss Baker counted stitches in a new pattern for a crochet-work Kante, or length of fine thread insertion. It was not unlike the pattern of the iron trellis above the scaffolding, that tapered black against the sky; man's fancy-work.
What hideously tame things women had to fill their lives with, Gwenna thought as she sat in the upper window of her tea-shop at the corner of the Embankment. She watched the luncheon-time crowd walking over Westminster Bridge. So many of these people were business-girls just like herself and the Butcher and the Baker! Would anything more amusing ever happen to them, or to her?
But that German girl, Gwenna thought, would stare to hear her work called "hideous" or "tame." It was her greatest interest. Already, she'd told Gwenna, her bottom drawer at her boarding-house was crammed with long, rolled-up crochet-work strips of white or creamy lace. There were also her piles of tray-cloths, petticoat flounces and chemise-tops, all hand-embroidered and bemonogrammed by Miss Baker herself. She was not engaged to be married, but, as she'd artlessly said, "Something a young girl can have always ready."
Day-dreams in crochet!
"I'd rather never fall in love than have it all spoilt by mixing it up with such a lot of sewing and cookery that it wouldn't get disentangled, like," thought the dreamy, impatient Gwenna. She returned, to find the German girl measuring her crochet lace against her arm and crying, "Since Saturday I have made till there." ...