She turned again to her work, and for a space only the sharp click of the machine disturbed the summer silence. It had an unmistakably indignant sound as though its manipulator were out of sympathy with the words so deftly printed on the white page. The secretary’s mouth became very firm as she proceeded, the brown eyes narrowed and grew hard.
Suddenly she lettered an impatient exclamation and looked up. “Oh, these platitudes!” she said. “How are they going to help men and women to live?”
For a moment she had almost a desperate look, and then abruptly she laughed.
“Perhaps it isn’t all your fault,” she said to the manuscript by her side, “that you give us stones for bread. You have lived on them all your life and don’t know the difference.”
“How do you know?” said a voice at the window.
The secretary gave a start. Her eyes met the eyes of a man who stood against the clematis-covered window-frame looking in upon her—a careless, lounging figure as supremely at ease as a cat stretched in the sunshine.
He marked her brief confusion with a smile. “Do tell me how you know!” he said.
Her eyes fenced with his for a moment, then were proudly lowered. It was as if she drew a veil over her face.
“His lordship is not here,” she remarked in a tone that was strictly official.
“So I have already observed,” rejoined the new-comer, with his easy tolerance that was somehow quite distinct from familiarity. “In fact, at the present moment, I believe his lordship is in the thick of an argument with the Dean as to whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote the Bible. It’s rather an important point, you know. Have you any theories on the subject, might one ask?”