Grace saw Miss Delmege make a hurried plunge into a small stationery cupboard, where she appeared to be searching for something elaborately concealed.
"I can't have that sort of playing fast and loose with the work," Char said icily. "If Miss Collins—"
"Mrs. Baker-Bridges," the doctor corrected her cheerfully.
"If my stenographer can't attend to her work regularly, she is of very little use to me."
"She's probably going to be of more use to the nation, let me tell you, than all the rest of you put together," said Dr. Prince.
Miss Delmege's agony of mind reached its culmination, and she let drop an armful of heavy ledgers with a clatter which effectually covered any further indelicate precision of utterance of which the doctor might have been guilty.
By the time that Grace had extinguished her own laughter in the cupboard, and had assisted Miss Delmege to pick up her books, the Doctor had slammed the door behind him, with a disregard for Miss Vivian's presence which might perhaps be accounted for by the searching cross-examination to which she had just subjected his proposed Medical Board cases.
"A doctor's profession, I suppose," Miss Delmege said to Grace in tones of outraged delicacy as they left the office together, "destroys the finer feelings altogether. I'm not prudish, so far as I know, but really, after what passed in the office today—"
"I wish you'd tell me what Mrs. Baker-Bridges said to you over the telephone."
Miss Delmege coloured and tossed her head.