“Miss Bromfield?” he said.
“Yes. And you are Mr. Gammell?”
“I am that brute—that ogre—that Simon Legree,” he replied, with a satirical smile which barely altered the line of his thin, pale lips under his small moustache. “Will you come into my office, please—at your leisure?” Emily thought she had never heard a polite phrase sound so cynically hollow.
She rose and followed him. He began at once and talked swiftly, now cutting up sheets of blank paper with a huge pair of shears, now snapping the fingers of one hand against the knuckles of the other, now twitching his eyes, now ruffling and smoothing his hair. He showed that he had gone through her work for several months past and that he knew both her strong points and her defects. He gave her a clear conception first of what he did not want, then of what he did want.
As they talked she became uncomfortable. She admired his ability, but she began to dislike his personality. And she soon understood why. He was showing more and more interest in her personal appearance and less and less interest in her work. Like all good-looking women, Emily was too used to the sort of glances he was giving her to feel or pretend to feel deep resentment. But it made her uneasy to reflect on what those glances from a man in his position and of his audacity portended. “I shall have trouble with him,” she was thinking, before they had been together half an hour. And she became formal and studied in her courtesy. But this seemed to have not this slightest effect upon him.
“However,” he said in conclusion, “don’t take what I’ve been saying too seriously. You may do as you please. I’m sure I’ll like whatever you do. And if you feel that you have too much work, just tell me and I’ll turn it over to some one who was made to drudge.”
He was at her desk several times during the day. The last time he brought a bundle of German and French illustrated papers and pointed out to her in one of them a doubtful picture and the still more doubtful jest printed underneath. He watched her closely. She looked and read without a change of colour or expression. “I don’t think we would reprint it,” she said indifferently, turning the page.
As he walked away she had an internal shudder of repulsion. “How crude he is!” she thought. “He has evidently been well educated and well bred. Yet he can’t distinguish among people. He thinks they’re all cut from the same pattern, each for some special use of his. Yes, I shall have trouble with him—and that soon.”
He hung about her desk, passing and repassing, often pausing and getting as near as possible to her, compelling her pointedly to move. She soon had his character from his own lips. She was discussing with him a “human interest” story from a Colorado paper—about love and self-sacrifice in a lone miner’s hut faraway among the mountains. “That will catch the crowd,” he said. “We’ll spread it for a page with a big, strong picture.”
“Yes, it’s a beautiful story,” said she. “No one could fail to be touched by it.”