“I’m glad to say I haven’t unpacked since I left Japan... Good-night, Lady Woodstock.”
She looked up at him curiously for a moment and then broke into a laugh.
“I’m not—Mr. Lane, you’re not mistaking me for Lady Woodstock, are you?”
“I thought you were. I saw your name on the plan of the table—”
“Oh, but that was because she was too tired to come. Sir Matthew brought me in her place. Wasn’t that a piece of luck for me? I’m his secretary. He’s not come in yet, has he? I simply daren’t go to bed until I’ve found out whether he has any more work for me.”
“He was still at the Plaza, when I left,” said Eric.
“Then I suppose I must wait up for him.”
She chose herself a chair, threw open her cloak and untied the scarf from her hair. Now that the girl had told him what she was, Eric wondered how he could ever have imagined her to be anything else. She looked eighteen or twenty and displayed the brisk assurance which he had come to regard as a woman’s price of admission to the temporary civil service. Her hair was bobbed and surrounded with a red band; a serviceable black dress revealed slender arms and shoulders; and her regular, rather sharp features were agreeably relieved by grey-blue eyes which seemed younger and less self-confident than the rest of her. Eric had met and striven to avoid very many of her type in English government offices; they were at all times too much emancipated for his liking, too energetic, efficient and certain of themselves, too conscious of sex-superiority to concern themselves with sex-equality. Sir Matthew Woodstock’s secretary looked devastatingly conscientious and practical; she billeted herself in the most comfortable chair with the determination which he could imagine her shewing when she arranged appointments and guarded her employer from unauthorized telephone assaults. And she would call him her “chief” rather than her “employer.”...
Force of habit, rather than any personal interest, had led Eric to spend a moment in cataloguing her; thereafter he was only concerned to find a polite excuse for going to bed. The girl seemed conscious that she had thrust herself upon him, for, after a short silence, she looked at her watch and exclaimed:
“I’d no idea it was so late! Mr. Lane, I mustn’t keep you up.”