‘It was so good of you to let me come and see your books, Mr Keeling,’ she said. ‘My brother has often told me what delightful Sunday afternoons he has passed with you here.’
He did not fail to notice that he was ‘sir’ no longer, but ‘Mr Keeling,’ nor did he fail to grasp the significance. He was ‘sir’ in his office, he was Mr Keeling in his house. Somehow that pleased him: it was like a mot juste in a comedy.
‘Your brother has often been very useful to me in my collecting,’ he said, with a hint of ‘employer’ still lingering in his attitude towards him.
She sat down in one of the big chairs that Keeling had brought in. That was the purpose for which he had fetched them, but for the moment he put on his employer-spectacles again to observe the unusual sight of his secretary sitting unbidden while he stood. Then the girl’s complete and unconscious certainty that she knew how to behave herself, whisked them from in front of his eyes again, and he saw only his guest sitting there, to whom were due his powers of entertaining and interesting her.
‘Charles tells me you go in for beautiful books rather than rare ones,’ she said. ‘Charles, have you told Mr Keeling about the official Italian book on Leonardo?’
‘No; I was going to mention it to you to-day, sir,’ he said.
‘Leonardo?’ asked Keeling.
‘Yes, Leonardo da Vinci....’
Immediately she saw that he had never heard of him, and without pause conveyed incidental information.
‘It will reproduce all pictures certainly by him,’ she said, ‘and a quantity of his sketches, with his drawings of flying machines, the Venice ones, you know. It will be published to subscribers only.’