“What rubbish! As though I didn’t know as much as you, any day.”
He laughed loudly. “Girls always think they know everything, but they don’t—not unless some fellow has——”
The sharp tap of Mr. Cleaver’s pencil sounded against the matchboard, and silenced them.
The fact that their conversations had to be more or less clandestine added zest to them, and although Elsie was not in any way attracted by young Leary, who was spotty and unwholesome-looking, she several times went to a cinema with him on Saturday afternoons, and once to a football match. After the latter entertainment, however, they quarrelled.
Elsie had disliked the mud, the cold, the noise, the standing about and the crowds. She had been bored by Leary’s enthusiasm, which was utterly incomprehensible to her, and secretly annoyed because, of the multitude of men surrounding her, not one had paid any attention to her, or to anything but the game and the players.
“I wasn’t struck on that outing of yours,” she remarked critically to her escort the following Monday morning. “Another time we’ll give the football matches a miss, thank you.”
Leary’s admiration for Elsie, however, was less strong than his desire to see a league match, and he offended her by going by himself to the entertainment that she despised.
Elsie resented his defection less for his own sake than for that of the excitement that she could only experience through flirtation, and without which she found her life unbearably tedious.
She had been in the office nearly three months when Mr. Williams asked her suddenly if she liked the work there.
“I don’t mind it,” said Elsie.