His eyes led hers to the old bookcases. She nodded. "It's a shabby old collection, but it's very dear to father's heart."
"It well may be. Gibbon, Hume, Froude, Parton—Lamb, Johnson, Carlyle—Hugo, Thackeray, Reade, and Trollope—Keats, Shelley, and the rest. What matters the binding? Some time I must read you a passage in good old Christopher North that appeals to me tremendously. No, not now, Miss Warne; I see I must fall upon my task without delay or you will be slipping away on the plea of bad faith on my part. Well——"
He turned his chair toward the table and took up a notebook. His face settled instantly into an expression of serious interest.
"I am going to ask you first," said he, "to copy in order upon a fresh sheet each reference which you find marked with a red cross, so that the references may be all together. Be very exact, please, and very legible. German and French words are easily misread by the typist who will put this work finally into copy for the printer."
Georgiana, glancing at the first marked reference, found cause to credit this statement, for it read:
Cagnetto: Zur Frage der Anat. Beziehung zwischen Akromegalie u. Hypophysistumor, Virchow's Archiv., 1904, clxxvi., 115. Neuer Beitrag. f. Studium der Akromegalie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Frage nach dem zusammenhang der Akromegalie mit Hypophysenganggeschwulste, Virchow's Archiv., 1907, lxxxvi., 197.
"It would be best to print the words as clearly as I can, wouldn't it?" she suggested, suppressing her desire to laugh.
"That depends on your handwriting. Try a line and let me see, please."
When she had shown him a specimen of the peculiarly readable script which she had cultivated in college, he signified his approval with a hearty "Good! That's a splendid hand for work, the hand of a workman, in fact. I congratulate myself. Go ahead with the jaw-breakers, only verifying each reference before you leave it."
Thus the new task began, and thus it continued day after day—not always quite the same, for Georgiana soon recognized that her employer was diversifying her labours as much as he consistently could by changing the nature of the copying. Now and then he refreshed her endurance and rested her tired hand by asking her to read aloud to him several just finished pages of his own writing, walking the floor meanwhile or sitting tipped back in his chair with closed eyes while he listened with ears alert for error of statement or infelicity of phrase, and she wondered at the character of the words she read.