She nodded. “I could brush up my shorthand and take it quicker.”
“Do you know shorthand?” He looked at her contemplatively. “Would you care to take a regular position, paying rather better than this casual work?”
“With you?” asked Miss Westlake in a tone which constituted a sufficient acceptance.
“Yes. Always supposing that I land one myself. I’m in a big gamble, and these,” he swept a hand over the littered accumulations, “are my cards. If they’re good enough, I’ll win.”
“They are good enough,” said Miss Westlake with simple faith.
“I’ll know to-morrow,” replied Banneker.
For a young man, jobless, highly unsettled of prospects, the ratio of whose debts to his assets was inversely to what it should have been, Banneker presented a singularly care-free aspect when, at 11 A.M. of a rainy morning, he called at Mr. Tertius Marrineal’s Fifth Avenue house, bringing with him a suitcase heavily packed. Mr. Marrineal’s personal Jap took over the burden and conducted it and its owner to a small rear room at the top of the house. Banneker apprehended at the first glance that this was a room for work. Mr. Marrineal, rising from behind a broad, glass-topped table with his accustomed amiable smile, also looked workmanlike.
“You have decided to come with us, I hope,” said he pleasantly enough, yet with a casual politeness which might have been meant to suggest a measure of indifference. Banneker at once caught the note of bargaining.
“If you think my ideas are worth my price,” he replied.
“Let’s have the ideas.”