The angry impatience, the annoyance with trifles which she had been experiencing all morning—an impatience which hours of manuscript reading had done nothing to alleviate—turned even so trivial an unsolved mystery into an infringement on her right to work undisturbed.
She blew a thin strand of red-gold hair back from her forehead, and sat for an instant drumming her fingers on the desktop. Then her woman's curiosity got the better of her. She arose quickly, piled the unread manuscripts on top of the blue-penciled ones and strode out of the office.
The clicking of the battered typewriter in the office adjacent to her own stopped abruptly and Jim Macklin, his collar loosened and his tie awry, called out to her.
"When you get through taking out commas, Monroe, there's something here you can help me with. Or maybe you should be more of the Bardot type. With that sweater you're wearing, it's hard to tell."
"What is it this time?" she demanded, pausing in the doorway, but making no attempt to smile. Then, the way he grinned, the boyish impulsiveness which made him seem out of place in a briskly efficient magazine office at ten in the morning, caused her face to soften.
It was insane, of course—that she should think of him in an almost maternal way. There was a dusting of gray at his temples and he was almost twice her age. But he was such a big bear cub of a man, with such a lost-orphan kind of helplessness about him at times, that he ignited the maternal spark in her.
She hoped it wasn't too bright a spark and that it didn't show in her eyes. She had a feeling that he could ignite it in other women, too, and knew it only too well and perhaps even traded on it. A man could go very far, she told herself with more cynicism than she ordinarily felt, if he could do that to a woman and be exceptionally virile looking at the same time.
"I could be wrong," Macklin said. "But I've a feeling that if you'd just bend over and breathe on this manuscript something wonderful would happen to it. Just the whiff of a really beautiful femme would do the trick. The guy has all kinds of complexes and plenty of painful hungers and I'm not sure the right girl is sitting beside him in chapter three."
"I bet there's a wolf pack on every page," she said. "I wouldn't be safe anywhere near a story like that."
"Nope, you're way off base, gorgeous. Just one guy. He's slightly beat, sure. But basically he's a romantic idealist. He's the kind of guy it would be hard to separate from a room in Paris overlooking the Seine. Wine bottles on the floor, tubes of half-squeezed-out paint scattered around, everything in wild disorder. Being human, with the hungers and all, he's been out on the Boulevard looking for—I blush to say it—a pickup. He's found one, but, as I say, I'm not sure she's the right girl for him. But judge for yourself. It won't take a minute."