She was just beginning to forget about swallowed safety-pins, and poor luckless Stan, and guineas for her Nursing Home, and the prospect of presently having seven mouths, big and little, to feed—she was even beginning to cease to hear the clamour of the Bits in the room along the passage—when there came a ring at the bell. Her fair head did not move, but her blue eyes stole abstractedly sideways as Ruth passed the pond-room door. Then a man's voice sounded, and Dorothy dropped her pen....
"Mrs. Tasker," she had heard, with the "a" cut very short and two "s's" in her name....
The next moment Ruth had opened the pond-room door, and, in tones that plainly said "You needn't think that I've forgotten about just now, because I haven't," announced: "Mr. Miller."
Now it was curious that Dorothy had just been thinking about Mr. Miller. Mr. Miller was Hallowells' Publicity Manager, and the time had been when Dorothy had had Mr. Miller completely in her pocket. She had obtained that comfortable contract of hers from Mr. Miller, and if during the latter part of its continuance she had taken her duties somewhat lightly and her pleasures with enormous gusto, she was not sure that Mr. Miller had not done something of the same kind. But the firm, which could excuse itself from a renewal of her own contract, for some reason or other could not get rid of Mr. Miller; and now here was Mr. Miller unexpectedly in Dorothy's flat—seeking her, which is far better for you than when you have to do the seeking. He stood there with his grey Trilby in his hand and his tailor-made deltoids almost filling the aperture of the doorway.
"There, now, if I wasn't right!" said Mr. Miller with great satisfaction, advancing with one hand outstretched. "I fixed it all up with myself coming along that you'd be around the house. I've had no luck all the week, and I said to myself as I got out of the el'vator at Belsize Park, 'It's doo to change.' And here I find you, right on the spot. I hope this is not an introosion. How are you? And how's Mr. Stan?"
He shook hands heartily with Dorothy, and looked round for a place in which to put his hat and stick.
"Why, now, this is comfortable," he went on, drawing up the chair to which Dorothy pointed. "I like your English fires. They may not have all the advantages of steam-heat, but they got a look about 'em—the Home-Idee. And you're looking just about right in health, Mrs. Tasker, if I may say so. You English women have our N'York ladies whipped when it comes to complexion, you have for sure. And how's the family——?"
But here Mr. Miller suddenly stopped and looked at Dorothy again. If the look that came into his eyes had come into those of a young unmarried woman, Dorothy would have fled there and then. He dropped his head for a moment as people do who enter a church; then he raised it again.
"If you'll pardon an old married man and the father of three little goils," Mr. Miller said, his eyes reverently lifted and his voice suddenly altered, "—but am I right in supposing that ... another little gift from the storks, as my dear old Mamie—that was my dear old negro nurse—used to say?" Then, without waiting for the unrequired answer, he straightened his back and squared his deltoids in a way that would have made any of Holbein's portraits of Henry the Eighth look like that of a slender young man. His voice dropped three whole tones, and again he showed Dorothy the little bald spot on the crown of his head.
"I'm glad. I say I'm glad. I'm vurry glad. I rejoice. And I should like to shake Mr. Stan by the hand. I should like to shake you by the hand too, Mrs. Tasker." Then, when he had done so: "It's the Mother-Idee. The same, old-fashioned Idee, like our own mothers. It makes one feel good. Reverent. I got no use for a young man but what he shows lats of reverence for his mother. The old Anglo-Saxon-Idee—reverence for motherhood.... And when, if an old married man may ask the question——?"