'Good-morning, Miss Potter. Lord Pinkerton in the office this morning?'
'He's in the building somewhere. Talking to Sir George, I think…. Did you fly this time?'
Whether he had flown or whether he had come by train and boat, he always looked the same, calm, unruffled, tidy, the exquisite nut.
'Pretty busy?' he would say, with his half-indulgent smile at the round-faced, lazy, drawling child who was so self-possessed, sometimes so impudent, often so sarcastic, always so amusingly different from her slim, pretty and girlish elder sister.
'Pretty well,' Jane would reply. 'I don't overwork, though.'
'I don't believe you do,' Hobart said, looking down at her amusedly.
'Father does, though. That's why he's thin and I'm fat. What's the use?
It makes no difference.'
'You're getting reconciled, then,' said Hobart, 'to working for the
Pinkerton press?'
Jane secretly approved his discernment. But all she said was, with her cool lack of stress, 'It's not so bad.'
Usually when Hobart was in Paris he would dine with them.