“No, I didn’t,” confessed Tommy, closing the book of Czerny’s Exercises, and rising with chin at an angle that, to anyone acquainted with the chart of Tommy’s temperament, might have suggested the advisability of seeking shelter.
“This is the editorial office of Good Humour, is it not?” inquired the stranger.
“It is.”
“Is the editor in?”
“The editor is out.”
“The sub-editor?” suggested the stranger.
“I am the sub-editor.”
The stranger raised his eyebrows. Tommy, on the contrary, lowered hers.
“Would you mind glancing through that?” The stranger drew from his pocket a folded manuscript. “It will not take you a moment. I ought, of course, to have sent it through the post; but I am so tired of sending things through the post.”
The stranger’s manner was compounded of dignified impudence combined with pathetic humility. His eyes both challenged and pleaded. Tommy held out her hand for the paper and retired with it behind the protection of the big editorial desk that, flanked on one side by a screen and on the other by a formidable revolving bookcase, stretched fortress-like across the narrow room. The stranger remained standing.