He brought her in. But Miss Frazier, at the moment of Petra’s entrance, was blind to Petra’s bodily reality. It was rather the reflection of her on the doctor’s face that Miss Frazier saw and read as easily as she was accustomed to read his illegible script. “It has happened at last,” the thought sliced through her brain, clean, knifelike. And then, flowing through and over the wound, came the tides of her will, cooling the painful gash. “Nobody must guess that it matters.... It doesn’t matter.... It can’t matter....”
It was will, too, that jerked her attention from the doctor’s mirroring face, after that first second, to the girl herself. There she stood in a cool white frock with a violet-colored felt hat slouched Greta Garbo fashion over bright curls. She looked frightened. Why should she be frightened?
“Miss Frazier will initiate you,” the doctor’s voice was blurred and as far away as his face, washed over by the tides of Miss Frazier’s brave will. “You must ask her anything you need to know as it comes up, Petra. That is the simplest way, I suppose, to learn the ropes. And now I had better have a look at the mail.”—It was there, already sorted for him into piles on his desk, with Miss Frazier’s accustomed clarifying notes attached.
Miss Frazier took Petra, first, to the dressing room which now they must share. “This door goes into my private office,” she explained, “and this into the reception room, which will be in your charge. I’ll clear all my personal things out of the desk at once.”
When she had taken off her hat and powdered her face, Petra followed the secretary to the desk which was to be, miraculously, her very own, and they stood looking down on it together—both of them inarticulate and at a loss. “Perhaps the best way will be for you merely to stick around and notice how I answer the telephone to-day,” Miss Frazier decided, after a minute of cogitation. “One of your jobs, when you have caught on, will be to take down the names and addresses of the new patients, and file them here in this card drawer. Do you see? Whether the doctor accepts them as patients or not, we want the names and addresses, and the date that they telephoned or came. That is the only recording you will do out here. The rest I attend to, and it all goes into the files in the inner office. The most difficult thing to learn will be which calls to pass on to the doctor, though. I don’t myself quite see how he thinks you are going to begin learning that....”
Meanwhile Doctor Pryne, with his door shut, stood looking down at his desk, but not touching the letters. He intended to take Petra out to lunch with him in a few hours and explain to her—although he could never do that really, since he didn’t understand it himself—how he had ever been so stupidly forgetful as to mention Teresa’s name to Clare, after Petra’s warning him not to. Petra would forgive him. She must, of course. And then she would finish about Teresa. Or perhaps Teresa Kerr was living in Boston and would be in at the office this very day to see Petra. Or perhaps Petra would take him to see Teresa. In any case, Lewis’ interest in Teresa had increased, almost unreasonably, since Petra had broken off telling him about her, Saturday afternoon.
Now, in another second, he must start in on the day’s work, beginning with the top letter on the right-hand pile—the pile Miss Frazier had marked immediate. And when he did start in, he must put Petra out of his mind,—luncheon plans, interrupted confidences, and all. If he was not capable of putting Petra clean out of his mind and keeping her there for hours at a stretch, then the situation he had got himself into would be absurd and impossible. But he had offered her the job of his own impulse, and the fact that she had accepted it in a totally different spirit from what he had expected, had nothing to do with her right to keep it. It was hers, of course, just as long as she wanted it, although her reason for wanting it had become a mystery to him. So, he must—in half a second—clear his consciousness of her there just a few feet beyond his closed door—clear it clean as a whistle.
But as he prepared to make the effort, the telephone buzzed at his elbow. Petra’s voice came to him, clear, clipped, but a trifle unsteady. “Mrs. Joseph Duffield is calling you from New York, Doctor. Shall I put her through?”
Lewis mentally congratulated his secretary. She had got Petra started already. That was fine. It was Miss Frazier who had decided, of course, that this call was one he would certainly want to take, and now she was showing Petra how to put it through to him. But he foresaw the time, soon, when Petra, if she really was going to save Miss Frazier and be of use to her, must be left to discriminate for herself, and that was going to mean many mistakes. He frowned, rather, realizing that eventuality, as he said, “Yes, thanks. I’ll take it.”
Mrs. Duffield’s first words, however, put everything else in the world out of Lewis’ mind. His fingers gripped the bar of the instrument and he listened with a graying face. Yet, when his turn came to speak, his voice was full of confidence, even buoyant. “You have the very best man. Doctor Stephens is an authority. That gives Michael every human chance possible. You did just the right thing. Tell Michael I am catching the first express and will be there in a few hours. My dear, don’t cry....”