She had frozen into the perfect secretary. With incredible speed she had the sheaf of letters before him, and with her writing pad in her hand awaited his dictation. Twice during the next hour she, with downcast eyes, corrected some error of his, once producing an impeccable file to show him that a week before he had demanded a reduction on certain wholesale terms, once to set him right in a date regarding previous correspondence. She had been five minutes late that morning, but she had saved him fifty in future correspondence. She seemed to know her files by heart: it was idle to challenge her for proof when she made a correction.
Then she had gone back with her shorthand notes to her room, and all morning the noise of her nimble fingers disturbed him through the felt-lined door. He was in two minds about that: sometimes he thought he would send her into Hugh’s room, where another typewriter worked. Hugh was accustomed to the clack of the machine, and two would be no worse than one. Then again he thought that the muffling of the noise alone disturbed him, that if she sat at the table in the window, and did her work there, he would not notice it. It was the concealed clacking of the keys that worried him. Perhaps it would even help him to attend to his own business to see how zealously she attended to hers. Those deft long fingers! They were the incarnation of the efficiency which to him was the salt of life.
Five days had passed thus, and on the next Saturday he had asked her brother and her, this time giving the invitation to her, to visit his library again. She had refused with thanks and a ‘sir,’ but Charles had come. Keeling had determined not to allude to his sister’s refusal, but had suddenly found himself doing so, and Charles, with respect, believed that she was having a friend to tea. And again, despite himself, he had said on Charles’s departure, ‘I hope I shall see you both again some Sunday soon.’
Well, he was not going to ask twice after one refusal of his favours, but, as the next week went by, he found the ‘sir’ and the dropped eyes altogether intolerable. These absolutely impersonal relationships were mysteriously worrying. She had shown herself a compatriot of the secret garden, and now she had retreated into the shell of the secretary again. This week the weather turned suddenly cold, and since there was no fireplace in her room, he invited her to sit at the table by the window in his, which was close to the central-heating hot-water pipes. A certain employer-sense of pride had come to his aid, and now he hardly ever glanced at her. But one day the whole card-house of this pride fell softly on the table, just as he took his hat and stick after the day’s work.
‘I wonder if you would do a book-plate for me, Miss Propert,’ he said. ‘I should like to have a book-plate for my library.’
She paused in her work but did not look at him.
‘Yes, sir, I will gladly do you one,’ she said. ‘Shall I draw a design and see if you approve of it?’
‘No, I know nothing of these things. But I should like a book-plate. Similar to the sort of thing you did for Lord Inverbroom.’
He hesitated a moment.
‘As regards size,’ he said, ‘perhaps you will come up and have a look at my books again, and get a guide from them.’