“Mr. Higgins asked me to tell you he was occupied, Mr. Melton. His report will go to you in a day or two.”
He was looking down at her, the young man who had written the little twisted fury of a tale called Dr. Filter, which Dicky had brought to Harrow Street for her to read. She sensed that he regarded her as an office girl, not as a reader. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or four. He knew that her words portended an evil fate for his present offerings. It was not hurt alone in his eyes, but rage, too.
Now Pidge’s mind whirled back to a pair of eyes in a baby carriage at Santa Monica; eyes of a male infant, said to be the handsomest of that locality where the hills and mesas break off abruptly for a sea wall. Large, still, steady blue-black eyes of an actor that had become calm because they were used to seeing faces wilt before them; long, curving coal-black lashes. Pidge hadn’t liked them in the infant; at least, they roused her unpleasantly somehow; and she didn’t like them now. The resemblance was deeper and more essential than that of family, but what held Pidge really was something she recognized, or fancied she did, something that had to do with being broke and threatened with hunger in New York. His clothing was fine, but had been long used. She had a positive divination for poverty.
Now his gaze was lost in her hair, as if he found hope there. Story failures and New York, fear, and its tough core of hunger, these amounted to one thing—but red hair was another. The astonishing part was the constant changing of expressions in his eye. They reflected every mood and whim of him, for one who could read; that is, when he forgot to veil them for purposes of his own. Just now he seemed to be wondering if he had better go any further with this red hair—if he had time to play. He didn’t seem to consider whether Pidge wanted to play or not, only whether the game were worth the while of one whose law was not to let any real chance slip. Pidge had forgotten the hurt of her message from John Higgins. She had a pronounced feeling that she wanted to hurt Melton some way herself....
“So I can’t see Mr. Higgins?”
“He’s been unusually rushed to-day.”
He laughed a little bitterly as if he understood all that. “Are you—are you his secretary?”
“No, an under reader.”
“I see. Have you been through any of my stuff?”
Pidge glanced at him resentfully; she felt he wouldn’t have asked such a question of a man.