“So you won’t come with me! Oh, Steve, sometimes 198 I can just see the whole mistake––you should never have made a fortune. Rather you should have been a nice foreman with a meek little wife in four-dollar hats and a large portion of offspring. You should have lived in a model bungalow with even a broom closet in the kitchen and leaded windows at one side. You would have been a socialist and headed labour-union picnics. But as my husband and my father’s assistant and all that––you are as impossible as that Faithful woman would be if she tried to be a lady!”
For a moment Steve hesitated. But the average day does not include losing ten thousand on the stock exchange from sheer folly, finding out that your blood pressure is too high, that your faithful secretary loves you and is truer blue than ever, and discovering at the same moment that you love her yet may not tell her so. Nor is a day so hectic usually concluded by finding an impromptu parlour picnic in full swing at home where rest was sought––finding, too, the full realization that you not only do not love your wife but you do not even approve of her.
So he said, quietly: “If you wish to make some radical change regarding your husband would you mind waiting until he has had a chance at a shower bath and some breakfast?”
For the first time in her life the Gorgeous Girl found herself gathering up Monster, the candy, and the novel manuscript in her lace-draped arms and standing outside her husband’s firmly closed door.
The shock was so great that she could not squeeze out a single tear.
CHAPTER XIV
Mary Faithful felt no regrets at having told the truth about her love for Steve O’Valley. The regrets were all on Steve’s side of the ledger. Contrary to customary procedure it was he who practised nonchalance and indifference, and the office force saw no whit of difference in the attitude of the president toward his private secretary or vice versa.
Long ago the force had accepted the attitude of these two persons as strictly businesslike and their conception of Mary Faithful was tinged with awe and a bit of envy at her success. To imagine her desperately in love with her employer, working for and with him each day, and finally in extreme desperation telling the truth as brutally as women sometimes tell it to women over clandestine cups of tea––was farthest from their comprehension.