"I'm sure you could." Barry spoke kindly and she turned to him with a feeling of relief. "When you have typed that article for Mr. Rose I'll show you how, and then you'll manage all right."
"Teach her now," advised Rose, looking up from the manuscript he was scanning. "This stuff wants a bit of revising, and you might as well do something for your living, Barry, you lazy wretch."
Barry smilingly disclaimed any right to the title.
"I'm ready to work as hard as anyone," he said gaily.
"But as I'm only considered fit to do the theatrical criticisms and play office-boy to you, Owen, naturally I find time to make holiday now and then. Well, Miss ... er ..."
"Gibbs." She supplied him with the name as he hesitated.
"Gibbs? You won't mind being known as 'Our Miss Gibbs,' will you?" His tone was free of all offence, and Toni smiled in response. "Now, here's a chair for me, and if only our chief will hold his peace for half an hour, I'll soon put you wise, as the Yankees say."
He sat down beside her, and pulling a couple of galley proof-sheets towards him, began to initiate her into the mysteries of "reading." For all his laughing manner he was an excellent teacher; and after twenty minutes of his clear and lucid exposition the girl felt she was beginning to grasp her lesson thoroughly. She proved, too, wonderfully quick at detecting mistakes, and Barry, who had petitioned the heads of the office they had selected not to send him any Council School product, was pleased to find that her spelling was admirable, her grammar passable, and her memory retentive.
As to the meaning which the article they were correcting conveyed to her, Barry was a little doubtful.
It was a short summary, by a famous Catholic writer, of some of the lesser-understood aspects of mysticism; and Barry suspected that a good deal of it was Greek to her, though she did her best to answer him intelligently when he questioned her, rather artfully, on the correct reading of a somewhat involved sentence.