"The very thing," John decided. "I will leave London on Christmas Eve, and you shall come down on Boxing Day. But I should travel in the morning, if I were you. It's apt to be unpleasant, traveling in the evening on a Bank Holiday. Hullo, here we are! This walk has given me a tremendous appetite, and I do feel that we've made a splendid start with the fourth act, don't you?"
"The fourth act?" repeated his secretary. "It seems to me that most of the time you were talking about the position of women in modern life."
John laughed gayly.
"Ah, I see you haven't even yet absolutely grasped my method of work. I was thinking all the while of Joan's speech to her accusers. I can assure you that all my remarks were entirely relevant to what I had in my head. That's the way I get my atmosphere. I told you that you reminded me of her, but you wouldn't believe me. In doublet and hose you would be Joan."
"Should I? I think I should look more like Dick Whittington in a touring pantomime. My legs are too thin for tights."
"By the way, I wonder if Janet Bond has good legs?" said John, pensively.
It was charming to be able to talk about women's legs like this without there being the slightest suggestion that they had any; yet, somehow the least promising topics were rehabilitated by the company of Miss Hamilton, and most of them, even the oldest, acquired a new and absorbing interest. John had registered a vow on the first day his secretary came that he would watch carefully for the least signs of rosifying her and he had renewed this vow every morning before his glass; but it was sometimes difficult not to attribute to her all sorts of mysterious fascinations, as on those occasions when he would have kept her working later than usual in the afternoon and when she would have been persuaded to stay for tea, for which she made a point of getting home to please her mother, who gave it a grand importance. John was convinced that even James would forgive him for thinking that in all England there was not a more competent, a more charming, a more—he used to pull himself up guiltily at about the third comparative and stifle his fancies in the particularly delicious cake that Mrs. Worfolk always seemed to provide on the days when his secretary stayed to tea.
It was on one of these rosified afternoons, full of candlelight and firelight and the warmed scent of hyacinths that Miss Hamilton rallied John about his exaggerated dread of his relations.
"For I've been working with you now for nearly three weeks, and you've not been bothered by them once," she declared.
"My name! My name!" he cried. "Touchwood?"