“May I drive you home?”
“I’d love to have you.”
IV
Not even the nights when they worked together, alone in the church, were more thrilling than their swift mocking kisses between the calls of solemn parishioners. To be able to dash across the study and kiss her soft temple after a lugubrious widow had waddled out, and to have her whisper, “Darling, you were too wonderful with that awful old hen; oh, you are so dear!”—that was life to him.
He went often of an evening to Hettie Dowler’s flat—a pleasant white-and-blue suite in one of the new apartment hotels, with an absurd kitchenette and an electric refrigerator. She curled, in long leopard-like lines, on the damask couch, while he marched up and down rehearsing his sermons and stopped for the applause of her kiss.
Always he slipped down to the pantry at his house and telephoned good-night to her before retiring, and when she was kept home by illness he telephoned to her from his study every hour or scrawled notes to her. That she liked best. “Your letters are so dear and funny and sweet,” she told him. So he wrote in his unformed script:
Dearest ittle honeykins bunnykins, oo is such a darlings, I adore you, I haven’t got another doggoned thing to say but I say that six hundred million trillion times. Elmer.
But—and he would never have let himself love her otherwise, for his ambition to become the chief moral director of the country was greater even than his delight in her—Hettie Dowler was all this time a superb secretary.
No dictation was too swift for her; she rarely made errors; she made of a typed page a beautiful composition; she noted down for him the telephone numbers of people who called during his absence; and she had a cool sympathetic way of getting rid of the idiots who came to bother the Reverend Dr. Gantry with their unimportant woes. And she had such stimulating suggestions for sermons. In these many years, neither Cleo nor Lulu had ever made a sermon-suggestion worth anything but a groan, but Hettie—why, it was she who outlined the sermon on “The Folly of Fame” which caused such a sensation at Terwillinger College when Elmer received his LL.D., got photographed laying a wreath on the grave of the late President Willoughby Quarles, and in general obtained publicity for himself and his “dear old Alma Mater.”
He felt, sometimes, that Hettie was the reincarnation of Sharon.