Settled at his desk, Wanning decided that he would not go home to dinner, but would stay at the office and dictate a long letter to an old college friend who lived in Wyoming. He could tell Douglas Brown things that he had not succeeded in getting to any one else. Brown, out in the Wind River mountains, couldn’t defend himself, couldn’t slap Wanning on the back and tell him to gather up the sunbeams.
He called up his house in Orange to say that he would not be home until late. Roma answered the telephone. He spoke mournfully, but she was not disturbed by it.
“Very well, Father. Don’t get too tired,” she said in her well modulated voice.
When Wanning was ready to dictate his letter, he looked out from his private office into the reception room and saw that his stenographer in her hat and gloves, and furs of the newest cut, was just leaving.
“Goodnight, Mr. Wanning,” she said, drawing down her dotted veil.
Had there been important business letters to be got off on the night mail, he would have felt that he could detain her, but not for anything personal. Miss Doane was an expert legal stenographer, and she knew her value. The slightest delay in dispatching office business annoyed her. Letters that were not signed until the next morning awoke her deepest contempt. She was scrupulous in professional etiquette, and Wanning felt that their relations, though pleasant, were scarcely cordial.
As Miss Doane’s trim figure disappeared through the outer door, little Annie Wooley, the copyist, came in from the stenographers’ room. Her hat was pinned over one ear, and she was scrambling into her coat as she came, holding her gloves in her teeth and her battered handbag in the fist that was already through a sleeve.
“Annie, I wanted to dictate a letter. You were just leaving, weren’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t mind!” she answered cheerfully, and pulling off her old coat, threw it on a chair. “I’ll get my book.”
She followed him into his room and sat down by a table,—though she wrote with her book on her knee.