"All right," he sighed—"I shall meet you halfway in this proposition—got that?" And the dictation went on. He discovered that in the intervals, when she had nothing to do, she read books and magazines, or worked on some sort of feminine fancy work.
Passing her desk, once, he picked up a volume of Kipling's poems and glanced bepuzzled through the pages. "You like reading, Miss Mason?" he said, laying the book down.
"Oh, yes," was her answer; "very much."
Another time it was a book of Wells', The Wheels of Change. "What's it all about?" Daylight asked.
"Oh, it's just a novel, a love-story." She stopped, but he still stood waiting, and she felt it incumbent to go on.
"It's about a little Cockney draper's assistant, who takes a vacation on his bicycle, and falls in with a young girl very much above him. Her mother is a popular writer and all that. And the situation is very curious, and sad, too, and tragic. Would you care to read it?"
"Does he get her?" Daylight demanded.
"No; that's the point of it. He wasn't—"
"And he doesn't get her, and you've read all them pages, hundreds of them, to find that out?" Daylight muttered in amazement.
Miss Mason was nettled as well as amused.