“Who is she?” Miss Frazier asked. “Where did you find her?”
“It’s Petra Farwell. She needed a job so badly that I offered her this one without considering very much her qualifications.” He had to admit it. “She has no training but I believe she can typewrite a little. She has done some copying for her father. But whether she can spell or knows how to make out a check, or anything of the sort, I don’t know. I thought we’d put her in the reception office with the telephone and the patients. She has a nice clear voice and nice manners. That will relieve you of the part you like least. Isn’t it so?”
Petra Farwell! That was the girl, the daughter of the novelist Lowell Farwell, about whom they had been speaking here in the office only a few days ago. A young architect, a Mr. Richard Wilder, had made an appointment for the sole purpose of asking Doctor Pryne to psychoanalyze the novelist’s daughter, and he had taken fifteen minutes or more of Doctor Pryne’s time doing it. It was with some satisfaction Miss Frazier had already made a memorandum of the bill she was to send for that interview and obtained the doctor’s approval of it,—twenty-five dollars. Doctor Pryne had turned down the case, naturally, since he was not a psychoanalyst, and really, anyway, had time for only serious work; but Miss Frazier remembered that he had accepted an invitation to tea at the Farwell home in the country. And this was the result!
Miss Farwell had not sounded a very attractive person. And why should she, the daughter of Lowell Farwell and the stepdaughter of a very rich woman, need a job so badly that Doctor Pryne had engaged her without consulting his secretary, or assuring himself of her qualifications?
But Miss Frazier pulled herself up at this point in her reflections. She had no business letting herself remember anything that had been said about Miss Farwell in a professional fifteen minutes here in the doctor’s sanctum. Her standard for herself was to approximate her employer’s professional attitude as closely as possible—one part of the mind for confidences given professionally, and the other, quite separated and even uncolored by that special knowledge, for the social contact. So at this moment she did not show by so much as a lifted eyebrow that she had any intimate knowledge whatever of Miss Farwell’s character.
“And I’ve promised her,” the doctor was saying, “that between times, when there’s nothing in particular to do for you, she can study shorthand and practice typing. Please order the best textbooks for that, will you, Miss Frazier, this morning,—and a machine. Rent or buy the machine, whichever is more economical. And she will have to have a table for it in the reception office. You can get that while you are out at lunch.—After she gets going, she might take on some of the book. As I said, she has done copying for her father.”
The expression with which his secretary received this last remark, however, showed Lewis his stupid mistake. “I’m just talking through my hat,” he said quickly. “That is a hopeless idea, of course. But can you tell me how it is that you appear to be the only known human living who can make out my stuff, Miss Frazier?”
The girl averted her face. Her clear-cut, almost cameo profile kept its accustomed impersonal secretarial look, but her cheek was hot. Lewis saw the unaccustomed color and was annoyed with himself for his second stupidity in the minute.
She said, “It’s a sixth sense I have about your writing, I guess. It almost seems so, anyway. I am not so extraordinarily good about all illegible handwriting. But even the first day, yours was pretty clear to me. It surprises me myself.”
“Well, that is the best of luck for me,” Lewis murmured, and was grateful to hear a door opening and a step out in the reception office. “That must be Petra,” he exclaimed, and went out quickly.