This was his great moment, to which he had looked forward, and she giggled at him! He felt himself writ down an ass, and wondered for the fraction of a second whether he would get more satisfaction from smacking her or from kicking himself. Then he saw her looking at him, and nothing seemed to matter. He dropped aitches and she giggled. Very well, then he wasn’t a superman, and she wasn’t divine. They were human beings, at this moment in the relationship of employer and employed.
“In future, you will sit at the little desk in here, Miss Mannering.” He met her eye defiantly as he spoke the “here.”
“If you have your notebook you can take this letter down.”
He was running away from his ruined situation. To dictate a letter to her had not been in the scheme at all, as he had planned it. It was a refuge, and a safe one, but as he dictated he saw in the letter his opportunity to indicate to her that he forgave the giggle. He was writing to an author about a manuscript, which he intended to publish, but broke off before he reached that decisive point of his letter.
“Wait a bit,” he said. “Here is the novel I am writing about. I want your opinion of it to fortify my own before I do anything definite. Will you have a look at it in here? I’m due at a Council meeting and must go.”
“Certainly, Mr. Branstone,” she said; “but my judgment isn’t very reliable.”
“We don’t know that until you try,” he said, escaping from his office to the Town Hall, where he kicked his heels for an hour till the meeting began Nor did he return to business that day. He had a shyness and a feeling of deflation. He needed time before he could expand again.
Effie took her reading of the novel conscientiously rather than seriously, not supposing that her verdict either way would go for anything, but appreciating his hint of confidence, and the fact that, considered as work, novel-reading was pleasant. And not finishing the manuscript at the office, she took it home with her to Rusholme.
In Rusholme the landladies are a little humanized from their primitive Grundyism, partly by the girl clerk, but mainly because few of them have avoided, at one time or another, the theatrical lodger, a valiant tilter at conventionalities; and it is possible for a woman in lodgings to be called upon by a man in the evening without being evicted as a sinner. One must, of course, choose one’s landlady with discretion.
Effie, who had not had the opportunity of selecting her parents and had suffered accordingly, chose her landlady with discretion. By now she had her friends, those she had made in Manchester, not those she inherited from her father; there were men amongst them, and they came to see her. Often, in fact, and especially on Sundays, her room was over-crowded; but a bed, in the semi disguise of a travelling rug, holds many callers, and they solved the problem of hospitality by bringing each a contribution to the feast.