Gage had continued to handle his work badly at the office. Like many a man with a hobby he took his hobby into business hours. But the concession which might be made to a man on account of golf, on account of curling, were not to be made for a man who had a boresome way of bringing in the eternal question of whether women were progressing or “actually retrogressing,” “whether all this woman movement weren’t a mistake,”—and so on. Needing support, comfort, consolation, encouragement and direction, Gage, as he felt about for them, only became somewhat absurd.
Men are not tolerant of those who bore them, except sometimes in the family, where such things are endured for practical reasons. They moved away from Gage, so to speak, while he talked on.
Sable noticed it. He had his own irritation, growing more focused each day. To begin with, they would lose the Laidlaw case and it was all, Sable thought, due to that false start which Gage had made. He had rather decisively taken the matter out of Gage’s hands towards the end but the thing had been lost already—or he preferred to think so. Sable could bear to lose cases but not a case which involved so much money. It frightened off the right sort of clients.
When Gage was a cub lawyer, arguing cases with flaring energy in the local courts, Sable had picked him out as a bright young man. He had kept his eye on him and his progress, with sheer admiration for the practical genius with which he picked up important clients and gained and held their confidence. He edged in on politics after a little—and in Mr. Sable’s own party. Then King and Sable had made a proposition to young Flandon—that he join them, bringing his clients, of course, and coming in, not as an ordinary apprentice lawyer but as the colleague of Mr. Sable. It was an amazing offer to be made to so young a man. Gage accepted it. Two years later King, rather elderly now and ready to retire, went to Congress and the firm name changed from King and Sable to Sable and Flandon. Flandon made good. He made important alliances for Mr. Sable, he played the political end for Mr. King, he made money for himself.
These things were not to be passed lightly over and Mr. Sable had them all docketed somewhere in his mind. He was fond of Gage too, in his own restrained way. But Sable was fifty-eight. He had seen many a brilliant start end in disaster, many a man with ability fail. He knew most of the signs of failure in men. He knew further exactly what steps Gage should take to achieve eminence. They were broad and fair before him. Instead it was increasingly clear that Gage was not keeping his mind on his work—that he was letting his nerves get the better of his judgment. For some reason or other he was making a fool of himself. When a man made a fool of himself, there were, in Sable’s experience, one of three things back of it—a woman, liquor or speculation. He was watching Gage to see which of these things it might be in his case.
All this talk which Flandon was always getting off about women now—thought the senior partner—that was camouflage. He felt fairly convinced that Gage must be playing the fool with some woman. Irregular and disappointing, with a lovely, fine looking, distinguished wife like Mrs. Flandon. Rotten streak in Flandon probably. Sable chose the woman solution rather definitely. Gage drank when he could get it of course. And he nearly always had a supply on hand. But he used his head about it pretty well. It didn’t seem like liquor trouble. As for speculation—surely he wouldn’t play the fool there. There was plenty of money coming to Gage, and he always could get more.
It must be a woman. Probably Flandon was trying to keep it from his wife and that was what was on his nerves. Some little—Sable characterized Gage’s visionary lady impolitely. He thought on, his mind lighting, for no apparent reason, on Freda. And there it stopped. Queer, Flandon’s bringing that girl into the office. Bright enough but no experience. Unlike him too, considering his usual impatience with inexpert assistance. He wondered—
So while the Brownley girls gossiped in ugly, furtive, rather lustful conversations and Ted Smillie told his little discovery on occasion as being an instance of what those “smooth touch-me-not girls were usually up to”—while Mr. Sable, his mouth tight in repression and his eyes keen, watched and noted Freda. Freda went on her serene way. She was serene and she was happy. At times her happiness seemed to shut her completely off from every one—even in her thoughts from her father. She never tired of exploring her memory for the sound of Gregory’s voice, the touch of his hands, the mystery of love. More and more as the days went by she hugged her secret to herself. She could not have shared a vestige of it. Its exquisite privacy was part of its quality. She had the vaguest notions of what might be waiting her as Gregory’s wife. Certainly she might have a baby—normally that probably would happen to her in the next nine months. Gregory was poor. They’d have to work. And there might be hard things. She thought once or twice that it might be an ugly sort of proposition if she did not have the particular feeling she did for Gregory. But there it was. It wasn’t a matter of the mind—nor of physiology either. She didn’t believe it was physiology which made her deliciously faint and weak as she read Gregory’s strange letters—letters so frequent, so irregular, so curiously timed and written—on the back of a menu, on a scrap of envelope, on a dozen sheets of hotel paper. Each message, beating, alive, forcing its entrance. This was the love that according to Margaret was the undoing of her sex. She knew she would go anywhere Gregory wanted her to go, to be with him. That she knew her life with him would have its independence completely in so far as her own love allowed it, did not make it less clear to her that even if the independence had been less, if she had found him a man of convention she would none the less—but would she?
She was immensely interested in possibly having a baby, and anxious to know about it. She wanted to tell Gregory. She wrote him letters in which she spent the deepest of her thought. She said things in her letters which would have astounded her if she had read them over. But she never did read them after she had written them. It would have seemed almost like cheating to read them as if for criticism.
But to-day she had not had a letter from Gregory and several unpleasant things broke in upon her absorbed happiness. She missed his letter which she usually went home at noon to get. In the afternoon as she sat at her desk working and trying to feel that she could fill up the time until she went home that night to see if there was a letter, Bob and Allison Brownley came in with another young girl. They were as resplendent as usual and Freda judged that they were collecting for some fashionable charity, from their intrusion with pencils and notebooks. She had seen women invade these offices almost every day for some such reason but it was her first encounter with Bob since that night on which she had left her house. To her horror she found herself flushing, and hoping that Barbara would not notice her and that thought enraged her so that she raised her head and looked full at the girls coming towards Mr. Flandon’s office, evidently referred to her.