He apologized for calling her so early. "I wanted to be sure of catching you," he said, "before you did anything. You haven't yet, have you? Not written to Shuman throwing up your job, or anything like that?"
Even over the telephone his manner was eloquent with relief when she told him she had not. "I want to talk with you," he said. "It's got to be somewhere where we won't be interrupted." He added, "I shan't say again what I said last night. You'll find me perfectly reasonable."
Somehow his voice carried entire conviction. The man she visualized at the other telephone was neither the distracted pleader she had left last night, nor the martinet she had been working for during the last month here in New York, but the John Galbraith she had known in Chicago.
"All right," she said, "I don't know any better place than here in my apartment, if that's convenient for you."
"Yes," he said, "that's all right. When may I come? The sooner the better of course."
"Can you give me an hour?" she asked, and he said he could.
It occurred to her, as the moment of his arrival drew near, that she might better have thought twice before appointing their meeting here in her apartment. Discretion perhaps would have suggested a more neutral rendezvous. But she didn't take this consideration very seriously and with the first real look she got into his face after she had let him in, she dismissed it utterly. They shook hands and said, "Good morning," and she asked him to sit down, all as if nothing had happened the night before. But he wasted no time in getting to the point.
"There's one idea you'll have got, from what I said last night, that's a mistake and that's got to be set right before we go any further. That is, that you owe your position here, as my assistant, to the fact that I'd fallen in love with you. That's not true. In fact, it's the opposite of the truth. That feeling of mine has worked against you instead of for you. I'll have to explain that a little to make you understand it. And if you won't mind I'll have to talk pretty straight." She gave him a nod of assent, but he did not immediately go on. It was a reflective pause, not an embarrassed one.
"I've always despised;" he said, "a man who mixed up his love-affairs with his business. In my business, perhaps, there's a certain temptation to do that and I've always been on guard against it. I've had love-affairs, more or less, all along. But in my vacations. You can't do decent honest work when your mind's on that sort of thing, and I care more about my work than anything else.
"Well, that night in Chicago, after the opening of The Girl Up-stairs, when I took you out to supper, I didn't know what I wanted. That's the truth. I'd been fighting my interest in you, my personal interest that is, calling myself all kinds of an old fool. I'd never had a thing get me like that before and I didn't know what to make of it. Well, the business was over, of course. I was entitled to a little vacation. I suppose, that night, if you'd shown the least sense of how I felt, even if it was just by seeming frightened, I might have flared up and made love to you. But you didn't see it at all. You had some sort of—fence around you that held me off. And for a while you even made me forget that I was in love with you. Forget that you were anything but the cleverest person I had known at catching my ideas and putting them over. I saw how enormously valuable you'd be to me, in this job you've got now, and I offered it to you.