“Of course; we’re engaged. I’m engaged to Rutherford Gillingwater, the adjutant-general of this state. You couldn’t be my private secretary if I wasn’t engaged; it wouldn’t be proper.”
The earth was only a flying cinder on which he strove for a foothold. She had announced her engagement to be married with a cool finality that took his breath away; and not realizing the chaos into which she had flung him, she returned demurely to the matter of the letter.
“We can’t change that letter, because it’s signed close to the ‘obedient servant,’ and there’s no room. But I’m going to put it into the typewriter and add a postscript.”
She sat down before the machine and inexpertly rolled the sheet into place; then, with Ardmore helping her to find the keys, she wrote:
I demand an imediate reply.
“Demand and immediate are both business words. Are you sure there’s only one m in immediate? All right, if you know. I reckon a postscript like that doesn’t need to be signed. I’ll just put ‘W. D.’ there with papa’s stub pen, so it will look really fierce. Now, you’re the secretary; you copy it in the copying press and I’ll address the envelope.”
“Don’t you have to put the state seal on it?” asked Ardmore.
“Of course not. You have to get that from the secretary of state, and I don’t like him; he has such funny whiskers, and calls me little girl. Besides, you never put the seal on a letter; it’s only necessary for official documents.”
She bade him give the letter plenty of time to copy, and talked cheerfully while he waited. She spoke of her friends, as Southern people have a way of doing, as though every one must of course know them—a habit that is illuminative of that delightful Southern neighbourliness that knits the elect of a commonwealth into a single family, that neither time and tide nor sword and brand can destroy. Ardmore’s humility increased as the names of the great and good of North Carolina fell from her lips; for they were as strange to him as an Abyssinian dynasty. It was perfectly clear that he was not of her world, and that his own was insignificant and undistinguished compared with hers. His spirit was stayed somewhat by the knowledge that he, and not the execrable Gillingwater, had been chosen as her coadjutor in the present crisis. His very ignorance of the royal families of North Carolina, which she recited so glibly, and the fact that he was unknown at the capital, had won him official recognition, and it was for him now to prove his worth. The political plot into which he had been most willingly drawn pleased him greatly; it was superior to his fondest dream of adventure, and now, moreover, he had what he never had before, a definite purpose in life, which was to be equal to the task to which this intrepid girl assigned him.
“Well, that’s done,” said Miss Jerry, when the letter, still damp from the copy-press, had been carefully sealed and stamped. “Governor Osborne will get it in the morning. I think maybe we’d better telegraph him that it’s coming.”