"Book-keeping, for instance, or literary work? Have you ever tried being a secretary? Ah, I am sure you have! You are not the sort of young lady to lead the life of a humdrum governess, eh?"
"I was my father's secretary," said Katharine. Mr. Parker was leaning across the table and playing with the pens in the ink-stand, so that his hand almost touched her elbow.
"Of course you were. So I was right about you, wasn't I? Don't you think that was very clever of me, now?"
He leaned a little nearer to her, and Katharine drew back instinctively and took her elbow off the table. He found the straight look of her eyes a little disconcerting, and left off playing with the penholders.
"Speaking seriously," he said, donning an official air with alacrity, "would you care to take a post as secretary?"
He had dropped his eyeglass and his supercilious manner, and Katharine took courage.
"I should, immensely. But they are so hard to get."
"Of course they are not easy to pick up, but in an agency like ours we often hear of something good. Let me see, would you like to go out to South Africa? Hardly, I should think."
Katharine said she would not like to go out to South Africa; whereupon Mr. Parker offered New Zealand as an alternative.
"Your connection seems to lie principally in other quarters of the globe," Katharine felt obliged to remark; and in an unguarded moment she began to laugh at the absurdity of his suggestions. Mr. Parker at once ceased to look official, and laughed with her, and began playing with the pens in the inkstand again.