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IT was exasperating, the way the Vollard girl lurked and ogled... Undoubtedly she was their best typist: mechanically perfect, with a smattering of French and Italian useful in linguistic emergencies. There could be no question of replacing her. But, apart from her job, what a poor Poll! And always—there was no denying it, the office smiled over it—always finding excuses to intrude on Manford's privacy: a hurry trunk-call, a signature forgotten, a final question to ask, a message from one of the other members of the firm ... she seized her pretexts cleverly... And when she left him nowadays, he always got up, squared his shoulders, studied himself critically in the mirror over the mantelpiece, and hated her the more for having caused him to do anything so silly.
This afternoon her excuse had been flimsier than usual: a new point to be noted against her. "One of the gentlemen left it on his desk. There's a picture in it that'll amuse you. Oh, you don't mind my bringing it in?" she gasped.
Manford was just leaving; overcoat on, hat and stick in hand. He muttered: "Oh, thanks," and took the "Looker-on" in order to cut short her effusions. A picture that might amuse him! The simpleton... Probably some of those elaborate "artistic" studies of the Cedarledge gardens. He remembered that his wife had allowed the "Looker-on" photographers to take them last summer. She thought it a duty: it might help to spread the love of gardening (another of her hobbies); and besides it was undemocratic to refuse to share one's private privileges with the multitude. He knew all her catch-words and had reached the point of wondering how much she would have valued her privileges had the multitude not been there to share them.
He thrust the magazine under his arm, and threw it down, half an hour later, in Lita Wyant's boudoir. It was so quiet and shadowy there that he was almost glad Lita was not in, though sometimes her unpunctuality annoyed him. This evening, after the rush and confusion of the day, he found it soothing to await her in this half-lit room, with its heaped-up cushions still showing where she had leaned, and the veiled light on two arums in a dark bowl. Wherever Lita was, there were some of those smooth sculptural arums.
When she came, the stillness would hardly be disturbed. She had a way of deepening it by her presence: noise and hurry died on her threshold. And this evening all the house was quiet. Manford, as usual, had tiptoed up to take a look at the baby, in the night nursery where there were such cool silver-coloured walls, and white hyacinths in pots of silvery lustre. The baby slept, a round pink Hercules with defiant rosy curls, his pink hands clenched on the coverlet. Even the nurse by the lamp sat quiet and silver-coloured as a brooding pigeon.
A house without fixed hours, engagements, obligations ... where none of the clocks went, and nobody was late, because there was no particular time for anything to happen. Absurd, of course, maddeningly unpractical—but how restful after a crowded day! And what a miracle to have achieved, in the tight pattern of New York's tasks and pleasures—in the very place which seemed doomed to collapse and vanish if ever its clocks should stop!
These late visits had begun by Manford's dropping in on the way home for a look at the baby. He liked babies in their cribs, and especially this fat rascal of Jim's. Next to Nona, there was no one he cared for as much as Jim; and seeing Jim happily married, doing well at his bank, and with that funny little chap upstairs, stirred in the older man all his old regrets that he had no son.
Jim seldom got back early enough to assist at these visits; and Lita too, at first, was generally out. But in the last few months Manford had more often found her—or at least, having fallen into the habit of lingering over a cigarette in her boudoir, had managed to get a glimpse of her before going on to that other house where all the clocks struck simultaneously, and the week's engagements, in Maisie Bruss's hand, jumped out at him as he entered his study.