"Will you be good enough to say that Lady Barbara Neave wants to speak to him?" she said in a voice of authority.
"I'll see," the clerk mumbled reluctantly. "Hold on, please."
She was not accustomed to being kept waiting, and Jack or the clerk kept her waiting so long that the Exchange enquired once whether she had finished and then cut short the call. She hung up the receiver and waited for the connection to be re-established. There was no sound for five minutes; they did not think it worth while to remember her existence or to recall that she had expressed a wish to speak to Mr. Waring, that she had been ordered to wait.... Taking down the receiver, she repeated the number. The same unwelcoming Cockney voice greeted her.
"I was trying to speak to Mr. Waring," she explained, "but I was cut off."
"Mr. Waring's ingiged—Oh, were you the lidy who just rang up? Mr. Waring says, Would you be kind enough to leave a message?"
Half an hour earlier Lady Barbara had been undecided whether to telephone herself or to arrange the meeting through her maid. Now she felt that, whatever it might cost her, she must speak to Jack without intermediaries. And, if he were engaged in a consultation (or whatever the absurd thing was called), so much the better.
"No, I don't want to leave a message," she answered. "I want to speak to him privately."
The new attack seemed only to consolidate the hateful clerk's already strong position.
"Oh, I thought it might be business. Mr. Waring never speaks to any one privately on the 'phone."