“Um—yes.” He looked relieved. “And I think it excellent work. Good morning.”
Emily gazed after his tall strong figure with the expression that is particularly good to see in eyes that are looking unobserved at another’s back. “He knows Gammell,” she thought, “and had an idea he might be annoying me. He wished to give me a chance to show that I needed aid, if I did. What a strange man—and how much of a man!”
When she saw Gammell half an hour later, she unconsciously brought herself up sharply. She was as distant as the circumstances of their business relations permitted. But Gammell, deceived by her former tolerance and by his vanity and his hopes, thought she was practising another form of coquetry upon him. As she retreated, he pursued. The first time they were alone, he put his arm about her and kissed her.
Emily had heard that women working in offices with men invariably have some such experience as this sooner or later. And now, here she was, face to face with the choice between self-respect and the enmity of the man who could do her the most harm in the most serious way—her living. And in fairness she admitted, perhaps more generously than Gammell deserved, that she was herself in part responsible for his conduct.
She straightened up—they were bending over several drawings spread upon a table—and stiffened herself. She looked at him with a cold and calm dignity that made him feel as futile and foolish as if he had found himself embracing a marble statue. Anger he could have combated. Appeal he would have disregarded. But this frozen tranquillity made him drop his arm from her waist and begin confusedly to handle the drawings. Emily’s heart beat wildly, and she strove in vain to control herself so that she could begin to talk of the work in hand as if his attempt had not been. His nervousness changed to anger. Instead of letting the matter drop, he said sneeringly: “Oh, you needn’t pretend. You understood perfectly all along. You were willing to use me. And now——”
“Please don’t!” Emily’s voice was choked. She had an overpowering sense of degradation. “It is my fault, I admit. I did understand in a way. But I tried to make myself believe that we were just friends, like two men.”
“What trash!” said Gammell contemptuously. “You never believed it for an instant. You knew that there never was, and never will be, a friendship between a young man and a young woman unless each is thoroughly unattractive to the other.”
He was plucking up courage and Emily saw that he was mentally arranging a future renewal of his attempt. “I must settle it now, once for all, at any cost,” she said to herself, with the resoluteness that had never failed her in crises. Then aloud, to him: “At any rate, we understand each the other now. You know that I have not the faintest interest in your plan for mixing sentiment and business.” Her look and tone were convincing as they cut deep into his vanity. She turned to the drawings and resumed the discussion of them. In a very few minutes he left her. “He hates me,” she thought, “and I can’t blame him. I wonder what he’ll do to revenge himself?”
But he gave no sign. When they met again and thereafter he treated her with exaggerated courtesy and no longer annoyed her. “He’s self-absorbed,” she concluded, “and too cool-headed to waste time and energy in revenges.”
But when her articles were no longer displayed, were on the contrary “cut” or altogether “side-tracked,” she began to think that probably the pinched-in look of his mouth and nose and at the back of his neck did not belie him. She felt an ominous, elusive insecurity. She debated asking Stilson to transfer her to some other department.