To-night she had one caller, Stewart, who, having been brought one Sunday by a man who knew a woman who was a fellow-clerk with Effie at her last-but-one place, had formed the habit of coming as often as he could. He was not at the Warden office that night, for the same reason which accounted for his not knowing that she had gone to Branstone’s. He was convalescent after influenza, too limp to write the super-journalism of the Warden, well enough to come out to take the tonic called Effie.
“I ought not to let you in to-night,” she said. “Thank Heaven for that,” he said, coming in. “Doing what one ought is the dullest thing I know—unless you’re really serious, Effie? In which case I’ll go.” His hand was on the door-knob.
“I’m really serious,” she said with mock impressiveness. “I’m working overtime. Behold!” She threw herself on the bed with the manuscript in hand. “This,” she announced, “is Work.”
“I can believe it,” he said, “because that looks like the typescript of a novel. If it were mine it would be a pleasure to read; but as it is not mine, it is probably work.”
“Oh, it’s work all right,” she said. “Hard labour, too. I’m reading it by order of my new chief. He publishes things like this.”
Stewart sat up. “Not Branstone?” he, said. “Don’t say you’ve gone to Sammy!”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“Know him? I invented him. Bit of a Frankenstein for all that. Better say I know most of him. He can still spring surprises on me, and you in his office are one of’em.”
“Why? Don’t you like his office?”
“It’s an office. So long as you’ve to be in an office, you could pick worse—easily. Sammy’s a stream with a lot of shallows in him, but there are also depths, and I’ve never fathomed them. There’s mud in him, but it’s not the nasty sort of mud.”