But, having risen to draw a curtain at a window, Mrs. Latimer suddenly turned about. “Stacey, you must go now!” she exclaimed. “I have just seen my husband coming up the street. I couldn’t bear to have you here in the room with both of us after what I said. I exaggerated. It isn’t as bad as all that. I shall be all right.”
He held out his hand to say good-bye, but she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. “Thank you,” she said.
As he left the house Stacey met Mr. Latimer. He looked like a steel engraving of a gentleman.
“Ah, you’re just going?” he remarked, with his cool polished smile.
“Sorry!” said Stacey. “I must.”
CHAPTER XXI
Stacey threw himself into work with a cold vigor that had in it nothing of fad or impulse. He did not find, as he had feared he might, that he had forgotten much. Everything came back to him at once; it had all been there, tucked away, neglected, within him. Neither did he chafe at the long regular hours he kept, nor feel them burdensome. In the old days he had perhaps been a little lazy; it had been hard for him on arriving at the office not to waste time—over a newspaper or a book-catalogue or anything that presented itself—before actually beginning his work; he had crept into work as a swimmer into cold water. Now there was no indolence about him; the instant he sat down at his desk he turned his mind on the problems before him; and, swiftly, intelligently, with intense concentration, he was soon accomplishing twice as much as any other man in the office. Indeed, less from a desire to be always busy than from a kind of impatient thoroughness, dislike of slovenliness, he often spent hours on drawings that he might have turned over to draftsmen. But, though he was extremely interested in his work, there was no such zest in it for him as he had once felt. Formerly he had romanticized it, had seen it all as something glowing and fine. Now it was only rarely that he experienced a little lifting sense of loveliness. This was when loveliness was really there to perceive.
Mr. Parkins, who was something of a dreamer and himself inclined to waste time, was amazed. He had difficulty in supplying Stacey with enough to do.
“Look here!” he said, before Stacey had been back a month. “What the devil’s come over you? You’re insatiable! You turn the work out as though it were arithmetic.” And he smiled in his uncertain reflective way.
“So it is, nine-tenths of it,—as unemotional as arithmetic. Nothing but concentration needed most of the time. Restful. A mistake to use your soul when you don’t have to.”